Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  “Okay. Because if I agree to send in another student, I’d ask that you kick them out the minute they start with the personal insults.”

  “Deal,” Nick said.

  The two men had dominated the first fifteen minutes of the meeting. One partner accused the other of intentionally losing his lucky pair of socks, which resulted in three ensuing sleepless nights until the socks were found. The sleeplessness, he claimed, then further weakened his immune system. Anna’s head reeled from trying to follow the man’s logic.

  “It’s this kind of carelessness that got me sick in the first place,” the man had said. “It’s recklessness. You either keep track of what’s important or you don’t. You didn’t, that’s why we’re here.”

  Amy had stepped in at this point. “Let’s keep the discussion on one thing at a time.”

  “There is no one thing at a time, sister. This is everything at once. That’s what you need to understand, but never will.” Amy burst into tears and stood to go. “That’s right, leave. Go back to your Girl Scout camp and toast marshmallows with your little flower friends. You can tell them all about your day with the big bad wolf who huffed and puffed and blew your house down.”

  “That’s enough,” Anna said. “Stop it.” He was quiet then, but his words hung in the air. There was truth behind his rage. How could she or Amy—or any noninfected person, for that matter—understand how it felt to be assaulted by an illness like this? He was rude, certainly, but she thought now it might be more than that. Maybe it was the impatience that came with having a finite number of years left. Even small bits of time were weighted. Social niceties were wasteful, including the few seconds it took to introduce oneself. That was her hunch, anyway.

  Anna turned to Nick now. “I need to get going. I’ll get back to you early next week.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “Thank you.”

  She was halfway down the hall when Nick called her back. “You dropped these,” he said, and handed over her car keys. She really needed to sew the lining of her pocket.

  It was still too early to pick Greta up, so she went into her office. She enjoyed working in the deserted building on weekends. She liked the emptiness of the offices, the absence of inhabitants echoing those Bible stories her maternal grandparents pelted her with during her girlhood summers where the virtuous were taken up to heaven, the world drained of all but the wicked. Their beliefs eventually made them a little pathetic to her, but she liked the peace and solitude and beauty of the Lancaster County farmland, spent hours wandering around the neighboring Amish pastures and properties.

  Anna’s parents were eclectic in their religious beliefs. Her father was a Jewish convert to Buddhism, a professor of Eastern Studies at NYU. Anna’s mother worshipped only her career as a physicist. Once, Anna’s father had taken her to a Seder at his parents’ apartment in Manhattan. She remembered a gathering of women, though surely there were also men there. She was ten or eleven and fascinated by the women in their black dresses and lace mantillas, serving the hard-boiled eggs and salt water. Her father had sneered, before and during the meal. When he donned his yarmulke, he crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue at her. Afterward, the two of them left early to get the train back to Brooklyn. Her father tossed his yarmulke into a trash bin on top of a crumpled newspaper.

  “Sorry, dear,” he said. “I’m getting old and sentimental.” He shrugged, smiled. “Wanted a sampling of my boyhood, I suppose.” Anna had laughed with him at his mocking irony, but secretly she was enchanted. She thought the Seder was beautiful, though she wouldn’t admit this to him, and part of her never got over the disappointment in her father for shielding her from such reverence, for keeping this part of her heritage secret and out of reach.

  She called home to check her messages. One from Greta to tell her she was already at home and didn’t need Anna to pick her up, and two more from her daughter. Anna would have to call Poppy back tonight, she knew, since unlike the first message when Poppy said she’d take Anna’s silence as a no, her daughter had called three more times.

  Poppy must be assuming Anna was still trying to make up her mind, which she most certainly wasn’t. She never wanted to see her daughter again, period. There was no forgiveness big enough.

  She turned on her microscope, slid one of the student-prepared slides underneath the lens. It was waxy and opaque with stain, as were the next five she checked—all unreadable. She would have to repeat the lesson Monday. Anna picked out the slide for AIDS from her specimen box, focused it under the light. She thought about what Nick had said earlier, that patients’ unpleasant characteristics often became exaggerated. Part of her wanted to push aside the issues of psychology and empathy and all the man-made handholds and explain everything at this, the cellular level. There was something moving about retroviruses like AIDS, the fact that an individual’s DNA was scooped out like half-melted ice cream to be replaced with the virus’s own code. She found it inexplicably engaging, the notion that all the various personalities of the sick in that awful meeting harbored the same skewed viral coding, a bad science-fiction movie coming true, everybody slowly becoming the same person in the end. It was easier to forgive tantrums when one saw the devastation at this microscopic scale, the heroics of the battle being fought over each of the body’s cells.

  When Anna got home she found Greta in her apartment. Anna had given her the keys and told her to use them anytime, but it was a bit disorienting to find furniture—she’d finally gotten a decent couch and table—Jimi Hendrix on the CD player, lit candles and huge vases of flowers. There were six arrangements in the living room alone.

  Greta came out of the kitchen with two glasses of wine. The scents from the kitchen were of rosemary and lime and rich autumnal spices.

  Anna smiled. “Are you trying to seduce me, dear?” She nodded at the flowers on the coffee table.

  “I was running out of room at home.”

  “He’s still bringing you flowers?” Anna asked.

  “He’s bringing flowers home.” She sat beside Anna on the couch. “He doesn’t actually present them to me, they just mysteriously appear.”

  “So, he’s been coming home, I noticed. I’ve been seeing the car parked out there.”

  Greta shrugged. “Anyway, something exciting happened.” She picked up a stack of manila folders. “Today after the rehearsal, the mother of one of the Beethovens told me about an adoption agency that specializes in placing hearing-impaired children. I have five of them here. The oldest one is eight, the youngest is three.” Greta opened the folder on top of the stack. “Look at her. Her name’s Lily, deaf since birth, natural parents deceased. Nearest relatives provided inconsistent care, in and out of foster homes since birth.” Anna glanced down at the black and white glossy, then over at Greta, who was gazing at the photo with a kind of maternal intensity that made a heat rise in Anna. This impulsiveness was something she never understood about her friend: Greta heard about a group of deaf children in need of homes and by the end of the day had eight files, no matter that she had no idea of the burden and heartache of motherhood or that her marriage was in a precarious state.

  “Well,” Anna said. “You’ll have to make some sober decisions.”

  “I have. I want a child, and who knows better than me what it’s like to grow up in silence?”

  “What does Mike think about this?”

  “I don’t care what he thinks. I’m doing it with or without him.”

  Anna shook her head and took a sip of wine. “You need to think about it. It’s not like getting a puppy from the pound.”

  Greta looked at her sharply. “There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted more than to be a mother, which I will be, one way or another.”

  “I’m sorry. I know.” Anna looked away, a little ashamed. She thought of her own body and its prodigal fertility. It wasn’t fair, Anna thought, her ovaries with their clutch of eggs falling uselessly all those years like beads from an unused evening bag. Early on in her pregnancy,
the O.B. ran his fingers lightly over her abdomen and said, “Young lady, you are superlatively fertile. You have years of childbearing ahead of you.” Anna had looked away, furious. And later, after she had given birth, the doctor made some smug comment—to her ears, anyway—about her elegant internal architecture that had made for such an effortless labor and delivery. “Oh, and what kind of elegant architecture will make raising this child easy?” Anna remembered asking.

  Anna looked down at the folder of the little girl. Blond and curly-haired with a round, cherubic face. She flipped through the stack of the others. No boys in the bunch. “Are you set on a girl, or were there no boys available?”

  “I want a daughter.”

  Anna nodded. The biggest disappointment after finding out she was pregnant was delivering a female. If she’d had a son her life would have been more open somehow, richer and finer, she was sure of this. Daughters were doomed in a way sons were not. A girl would never get everything she wanted. Girls were born divided—part of them would always be in thrall to family or nurturing in some way or another. How could a mother look at a newborn daughter and not relive the disappointment of her own life? Although perhaps that wasn’t quite the way to think of it. Maybe it was just a matter of personal preference, whether one liked the traces of things or the things themselves: sons came through you and left to pursue their own lives, which was what made loving them as children—she guessed—poignant. Girls, well, most daughters, never really left. Daughters were dazzleflauge, a herd of zebras in which one was indistinguishable from the next. She’d heard other mothers say that they didn’t know where the mother ended and the daughter began. As for Poppy, Anna had never felt her daughter to be fully present or foregrounded; she was merely part of the landscape of Anna’s life. Here for a while, then gone, a presence indistinguishable, an absence unnoticed.

  “Do you think I should consider a boy?”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “I mean, I wouldn’t rule against any child based on gender alone.”

  Anna felt an uncomfortable silence rise up and she knew Greta was waiting for her to offer information about Poppy. She’d glossed over that part of her life so quickly when they first met that Anna didn’t know for sure what—or if—Greta remembered. But Anna saw from her friend’s expression, the hard defensive set of her jaw, that she certainly had.

  “I wanted a son, quite frankly. My daughter and I were estranged almost from the beginning.”

  Greta looked up.

  Anna shrugged, poured herself another glass of wine. “Some women aren’t meant to be mothers. I’m one of them.”

  “But you love her, right?”

  “Of course,” Anna said, and wondered if this was true. She searched through the stack of folders until she found the one she spotted earlier and liked the best. A little girl who looked to be of mixed race, whose intelligence was apparent even in the poor quality photograph and strange department store studio smile; to look at the faces with their forced ear-to-ear grins one would think the whole lot of them had just been pulled from Santa’s lap. “I like this one,” Anna said, “Rashida McNeil. She’s smart, you can see it in her eyes.”

  “I know. I was looking at her. Kind of a rough history, though, might have some behavior problems.”

  “Anyway, there’s a lot to think about.” Anna wanted to be done with the subject. She hoped Greta would reconsider the whole idea of adoption. It was stressful enough when you had nine months to work yourself into being somebody’s mother; Anna couldn’t imagine anyone intentionally saddling herself with this role overnight. And what if the kid turned out to be defective? What kind of trauma would Greta be in for if she’d have to return the child? But of course, Greta wouldn’t ever do that. Anna picked up the vase of hyacinths on the end table and inhaled their sweet and heady perfume. There was no scent she liked better than this, no fragrance in the world that carried her back in time more than this. The languid days of her youth when everything was possible and still ahead and richly promising. She put the flowers down when she saw Greta watching her. Anna hadn’t meant her attention to the flowers to be a reproach, but she saw that was how Greta was taking it. The mysterious bouquets from an absent husband, the faces of the orphaned children blooming on the couch between them.

  “You’re welcome to stay here tonight,” Anna said quietly. “As long as you need to.”

  “Thank you. I just might do that.”

  Anna sighed, grateful for Greta’s willingness to let things go. “I remember what it was like to wait for my husband to come home so I could finish fighting with him.” She laughed. “We’d have a little tiff in the morning, he’d go off to work, and I’d fume all day. He wouldn’t take my calls, which only made it worse. By the time he did come home I would be homicidal. Mild annoyance turning into murderous rage over nothing.” She paused. “I’d trade everything to have him back.”

  Greta’s eyes filled. “What am I going to do? What am I doing wrong?”

  “Nothing. Nothing is my guess. I suspect he’s going through something that has nothing to do with you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t. It’s just a hunch.” She remembered driving up country with Hugh, of the utter peace she felt with him, even early in their marriage. He used to hold her hand as he drove. The memory of the light of the north and the way his skin looked in it still had the power to stop her in her tracks. There was nothing more exquisite than that kind of happiness. Their fights were infrequent, but when they did happen Anna was frantic, terrified that this was the fight that would drive him away for good.

  “I feel for you,” Anna said. “Marriage is a kind of wonderful hell. I think I’d trade all my remaining years to relive just one of the ones I shared with Hugh. One of the good ones.”

  Greta nodded. “Let’s eat. This is getting morbid. Mike’s driving around. Until I can prove otherwise, I’m taking him at his word.”

  “A fine plan,” Anna said, and moved into the kitchen.

  After dinner Anna sat in the back room with her cello, too sleepy from the food and wine to really practice, but too restless to be good company either. She put the vase of hyacinths beside her and played a Brandenburg concerto from memory with her eyes closed, let herself relax under the mathematical logic of Bach and the scent of the flowers. She drifted back to the summers on her grandparents’ farm, heard again the sound of the nighthawks and cicadas, smelled the cooling pies on the windowsill and the damp night air.

  She forced herself back into the present, back into the knotty coils of Rachmaninoff. Why didn’t orchestras play Bach anymore? She found her sheet music and jumped to the middle of the third movement, the one giving her the most trouble. Her hands simply weren’t big enough to span the chords. She felt every note physically, an ache in the webs of skin between her fingers, the pressure of holding the strings tight when she bowed through the D chords.

  The phone rang when she was a few measures into it. She hesitated, unsure whether to pick up or let the machine take it.

  “Do you want me to get it?” Greta yelled from the living room.

  “Well,” Anna said, and put her cello aside. Greta was on the phone when Anna walked in. “Oh, hello. One second.” She held out the receiver to Anna. “It’s Poppy.”

  “What? Who?” Anna said.

  “Your daughter.”

  What could she do? She certainly didn’t want to talk to Poppy, but wanted even less to have to discuss the reasons with Greta. Anna took a deep breath. “Hello,” she said.

  “It’s Poppy.”

  “Yes.” Anna heard the crackle of long-distance static, an echo in the line. “It sounds like you’re on Jupiter.”

  “Close. I’m in Alaska.”

  “Oh,” Anna said. Greta was sitting on the couch in front of some epic war film she’d rented. Anna knew Greta was only pretending to watch the movie; the real drama was on Anna’s end of the couch. There was a cordless phone in the bedroom, but before Anna could ask her daug
hter to wait while she switched phones, Poppy rushed in.

  “I’m guessing since you didn’t return my call that you don’t want us to come. But I wanted to make sure.”

  “Well,” Anna said. “No. I hadn’t decided anything. What is it you wanted?” Greta looked up, raised an eyebrow. “I mean, what is it you wanted to discuss?”

  “I really don’t want to get into it over the phone. I was hoping you would say yes to a visit. Even a short one.”

  Anna heard a child’s voice in the background. Her granddaughter. “Do you need money?” There was a trust fund, money in escrow from Hugh, that Poppy had never touched.

  “No, it’s nothing that simple.”

  Anna paused, listened to her daughter’s breathing over the line, glanced at the television, where a battlefield scene shot from a great distance made the soldiers tiny, a teeming zoo of microbes. “Okay.”

  “It’s okay if we come?”

  Anna cursed herself for not taking the call in her bedroom. That way she could have insisted that Poppy at least tell her the general category of the question and let a little of her anger spill out. This would not be a visit about Anna welcoming her back. There would be no forgiveness.

  “Mother?”

  “When?”

  “Two weeks? In two weeks?”

  “That will be all right. So, it’s possible to drive down from Alaska in about two weeks?”

  “Oh, yes,” Poppy said. “We plan to hurry. I’ll call you when we get close, how’s that?”

  Anna said fine, and hung up. The men in the film were supposed to be gladiators, Anna determined. “Well, that’s that.”

  Greta looked over. “Is everything all right?”

  “No. No, it’s not. Poppy wants to come and visit.”

  “That’s not good?”

  She shook her head. “No. Something’s wrong. I feel it.” She poured a glass of water. Her head was light, spinning, a panicked fluttering of adrenaline rushing through her.

  Since childhood, a kind of knowledge, a prescience, welled up like it was now, with just these physical sensations of a racing heart and ringing ears, shaky legs and tingling scalp. But with her intellectual parents on one side and her devout grandparents on the other, she’d shut it out, disturbed by any knowledge that didn’t come empirically or through one of her five senses. Occasionally, though, her intuition burst through anyhow: the time when five-year-old Poppy went to a pool party at the neighbor’s house and Anna, two doors down, heard her daughter calling her. This was what she told herself, anyway, that she heard Poppy’s voice, though over the drone of the TV—it was on continuously in those days—and the neighborhood traffic, it would have been impossible.