You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  I sensed people watching me from inside their rooms. Peering through binoculars. Through the windshield, it was as if the motel’s orange lights kept exploding. Memories rose from their soil beds and passed me, trailing wisps, axons that wouldn’t connect to any greater whole, and dissipated in the air around the car.

  The air was so salty I could feel it on my teeth.

  After the boat docked at Islesford, I called Betsy’s house twice from the ferry manager’s office, but no one answered. The Islesford harbor resembled Northeast’s, though it was smaller, more industrial, less layman-friendly. Fishermen at that hour were few, either hanging around on the long piers or cleaning gear. A wall of rigid, bristling trees in front of me was gauzy with fog.

  I bought a grilled cheese sandwich at the harbor grill. After I said I was Betsy Gardner’s nephew, the bartender said of course he knew her, she insulted his food regularly. He gave me vague directions, and after a long walk, I was standing outside the cottage. It was perched on the coastline, gray-shingled, rotted by the sea air and winter sleet, gradually collapsing. There weren’t any neighbors. The front door was unlocked. The house inside smelled like Cape Near, of old birch shelves and ocean air and cigarettes, and newspapers in sheaves growing mold. The quiet was deeper than I’d ever before experienced. I spent the day reading an Agatha Christie novel in Betsy’s living room, and then exploring when I couldn’t sit still. The refrigerator was empty. For dinner, I found two cans of tuna fish and ate them while I studied Betsy’s map of White House conspiracies. I couldn’t make any sense of it. Clusters of cabinet members drawn by arrows to subcommittees and names of corporations, as if someone had fired Post-it notes from a shotgun.

  A paper trail she couldn’t stop adding to, I thought.

  I slept on a cot I found stored away in the basement, woke at dawn to the summer light, and lay there for three hours, studying the sky through the small window, hearing the wind drag tree boughs across the roof.

  Betsy pulled in at lunch and parked her golf cart on the lawn. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, but was pale and shaky, smaller than usual in khaki shorts, a Shetland sweater, and a yellow slicker that reached down past her knees. Her legs underneath were thin as broomsticks. At arm’s length, peering up through her glasses under the beach hat, she wanted to know if I’d come to fix her roof. I said, How else would you get me out here? She harrumphed and squared me in the eye, then told me where to find the ladder.

  “I heard about the boat,” she said, leaving it at that.

  The temperature dropped quickly after dark. We drank a bottle of wine before getting to dinner, except Betsy only kept tuna in the house and I’d finished the tuna, so we opened a second bottle of wine and put on additional sweaters. She told me between cigarettes where she’d been, up at the hospital in Bangor. They’d made her stay over the previous four nights. The cancer they’d removed years ago during the mastectomy had returned, metastasized into a dozen lymph nodes on her right breast. The voice mails I’d ignored at the house had asked me to drive her up to the hospital, but since I never called back, she’d phoned Joel.

  “I’m very disappointed in you, Victor.” She let it hover in the air. “Why don’t you get a goddamn cell phone? Even I have one.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Truth is, it’s to my benefit you’re so selfish. Joel and I had some conversation. It’s a long drive. I like him.”

  “People change.”

  “Well, some can’t,” she snapped. “I’m dying, Victor. This time it will work. I’m very depressed, I don’t know that you’d care.”

  A moment later, I said, “I can’t lose you.”

  We remained seated. Betsy carefully stubbed out her cigarette.

  In the morning, I wandered out through the fog to the shed. The roof truly was in rotten condition. A third of the shingles had come undone and the rest looked ready to fall off in the next storm. I worked steadily at removing the bad ones and patching a number of small holes. I’d done some roofing one summer during school, and it looked as if Betsy’s roof dated to about the same period. Betsy weeded below me while I worked, and then went in for a nap. In town by the docks, I inquired at the market where I could buy proper supplies, and the proprietress put me on the phone with a hardware store in Northeast Harbor. They said they’d have them for me on the ferry the next morning.

  The roof took an additional four days. At lunch, Betsy brought out tuna sandwiches and yelled at me not to fall. She wasn’t sure, she said, if her accident insurance covered people who were naturally unfit for labor.

  At night, I read Agatha Christie novels aloud to Betsy until she nodded off, then I’d stay up listening to country music or talk radio, whatever I could dial in for company. I didn’t sleep much myself. I’d packed a fresh copy of Sara’s screenplay, and I forced myself to read it again. I asked Betsy on the fifth night if it would be okay if I stayed another week. In the backyard there was a hammock strung between two locust trees. “You look just like Uncle Bill,” Betsy said one afternoon when I was lying out there, reading the screenplay, and she went in and got her cane just to come visit and hold my hand for a minute.

  One morning I unpacked a number of science journals I’d thrown in my duffel bag, and out fell the Gardner genealogy. I’d forgotten I’d packed it. I picked it up and went and found Betsy, watching television in her room.

  “This book isn’t very current,” I said.

  “Dear, you’re saying I’m out of date?”

  “Your generation is barely mentioned.”

  “Well, Father was an admiral. You don’t reach that level in the Navy thinking about your children.”

  I saw a deer the next day in Betsy’s front yard and named him Bananas. Twice I telephoned Cornelia, but couldn’t reach her. I left messages at the house, letting her know where I was and how to put out the recycling. I apologized about my strange behavior. As for work, after lunch one day, I requested a sabbatical over the phone while sitting in Betsy’s living room, shuffling a deck of Uno cards. Given rumors about what had happened in Seal Harbor, Soborg had no problem if I wanted a little personal time away from campus.

  Lucy was less accommodating when I called her afterward to cede control.

  “I don’t understand. What’s happening?”

  “I need some time to myself,” I said. “Time to think.”

  “Think about what? About the Nature paper?”

  I explained that I’d phoned the editors and requested they remove me as principal investigator and give her the primary authorship. She said that made it even worse.

  “I’ve never been a producer for the Victor Aaron show.”

  “Lucy, I know.”

  “Honestly, until recently I didn’t think you saw me that way.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “Who gave you the right anyway to go off the reservation and make a decision like that? Since when do I need top billing? That’s what you think I care about?”

  “I’m sorry, Lucy.”

  “If you want to retire, if you’re giving up, then let me know that. We’ll work out a schedule and I’ll figure out how to get the hell back to New York. But at least show me the courtesy, after all these years, to include me in the decision.”

  “I understand.”

  “You do? Don’t you see how once again you’ve shut me out?”

  The next morning, I called Lucy back and she was willing to talk, but only because she had in her hand that day’s Bar Harbor Times. Apparently I’d made the news. Lucy read aloud from the police blotter describing one local resident, Dr. Victor Aaron of Somesville, as “a public nuisance,” having trespassed on “the deck of a prominent Seal Harbor family’s Sou’wester, nude.”

  Some Soborg PR representative had managed to keep my title at the lab from making the news, but otherwise the details were correct: the bike chain, the “public urination.” Hearing Lucy laugh, I was filled with pride. I’d officially been made a local, a
nd all it took was pissing off the right people, or on them. And then the humiliation sank in.

  Everyone I knew would see this. It would appear on the Internet, be e-mailed through chains of colleagues, be republished on listservs. What would the National Institutes of Health think of my state of mind the next time I applied for a grant? Was my tenure really so secure? What about my reputation?

  Before we hung up, I asked, “What about Deke?”

  A long pause. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Lucy,” I said, “I really am sorry.”

  “So am I,” she said.

  I couldn’t sleep. Betsy’s spirits checked in and out. For a full day she wouldn’t talk to me after I’d made fun of Andy Rooney’s twitching hands. Several times she went with Joel to see her doctors and came back angrier, more resolved not to seek treatment. But she had her sprightly moments. So impressed was Betsy by my escapade that she cut out the police blotter and had a print shop in Northeast Harbor enlarge and frame it so that she could hang my prize above the toilet.

  “I always knew you had it in you,” she said.

  After considering it for days, I called Mark, Sara’s agent. I told him about The Perfect Husband. I promised to put my copy on the mail boat first thing. He was over the moon.

  “Best thing she ever wrote,” I said.

  “I can’t wait,” he said.

  “How’s Mother?” Joel asked.

  “Today, pretty cheerful, actually.”

  “Not her mood, her health, Victor, how does she seem?”

  “She’s like she’s been. It’s a good week. She talks about you all the time.”

  “Well, we’ve got a private party practically every night, I don’t need anything more shoveled onto my plate right now.”

  “Joel, I didn’t mean—”

  “Forget it. Sorry. This is tearing me up. Tell her I’ll come out soon. Tell her that.”

  “I will.”

  Two more weeks of foggy mornings passed on Cranberry, evenings lost drinking and playing cards with Betsy, betting on who’d pay for the wine the next morning. I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. The evening in the ferry parking lot seemed like months before. I missed work, though. I missed knowing what I’d accomplished between one point and the next.

  One Wednesday evening, we attended a potluck supper at St. Mark’s of Islesford. We made cocktails and spent an hour getting ready. I found an old tie of Uncle Bill’s and Betsy decorated the brim of her gardening hat with daffodils. We were drunk by the time we arrived in the golf cart. The white chapel with the pea-green steeple was bursting, maybe forty people milling around folding tables in the yard. Betsy hobbled off to catch up with friends, and I wound up in conversation with a short woman in a flapping rain poncho and the kind of glasses they gave out free at the optometrist’s. She looked like a welder on a camping trip.

  “You’re new around here.”

  “I was married to Betsy’s niece.”

  “The girl who died in the car accident.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sara, she was a duck on the field hockey team, back when. Well, all are welcome.”

  “Thank you. The food’s delicious.”

  “Am I religious?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, are you? You go to church?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “No. Who does these days?”

  I snuck inside to look around. Behind the hall was a small, pinepaneled sacristy with an altar and a coatrack supporting vestments. No one was around. With creaking joints I knelt on the prayer bench and felt the symptoms of an episode start and dissipate. No tears, but I was woozy. Got up for some fresh air and stumbled into a conversation between the welder and the elderly parish priest outside. I apologized for interrupting them. The priest gripped my hand, a powerfully strong grip. He said I could call him Ken. He looked like a retired Elvis: white pompadour, muttonchop sideburns, and a thick sunburned neck. He invited me to stop by some time for a tour. I said I’d be sure to do that.

  Lucy called late that night. It was two in the morning and she was still in the lab. She’d been entertaining visitors, Brian and Trinny Fowler, a wealthy Boston couple looking to sponsor some research. Occasionally rich people would call us up, seeing a donation to science as a component of their philanthropy. Mr. Fowler, Lucy informed me, had made his fortune building a microchip company, and Mrs. Fowler had spent most of it on face-lifts.

  “Like someone Saran Wrapped her face. Why these women do these things, Victor. But his mother had dementia, and he’s worried about his grandchildren. Anyway, I gave them the tour. They’d never seen a mouse room before. The wife asked if I was normally there at night, ‘among the rats.’ I said yes, that I usually worked late, and I tried explaining how we do not actually go into the mouse rooms at night so as not to disturb them, but then she interrupted me, she said, ‘Well, it doesn’t seem like much of a life for a lady.’”

  A pause. “They said they’d send a check next month. Otherwise I could have killed her.” A longer pause. “You know Deke called last night.”

  “Really?”

  “He calls during downtime. He’ll probably call in five minutes.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He talks about patients. It’s all slapstick.” She laughed wearily. “They fist-bump instead of shaking hands, to avoid germs. Logical, right?”

  “We should try that.”

  “Then he says—this is last night—that every time something crazy happens, he makes a note on his Palm Pilot to tell me about it later. He has a file going back to last winter.”

  “To when he proposed.”

  Lucy stopped. I could hear that she wanted to tell me more. Maybe I wouldn’t have heard that before.

  “He says he misses me. That he still loves me. I just don’t understand people sometimes.” Her voice was shaky. “It’s like, I’m on this side of the river and everyone else is over there.”

  “Lucy, if you love him, you know it,” I said. I wished I had more to give. “Do you love him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m on your side, Lucy,” I said.

  Without my work, without the lab, systems slowed down. I felt paler. I knew I was losing weight. I stopped at the church one afternoon on my way to meeting Betsy for lunch, and Ken the priest was cutting grass in hiking shorts, no shirt. He was fit, tan, and freckled. His pompadour magically stood aloft. He invited me in for iced tea. He explained how he and his wife, Dorothy, lived on Little Cranberry in the summers, but during the year they looked after a small parish in New Hampshire, where his wife’s family came from, in Warren. I asked them what they did at night on the island.

  “Mostly watch television. My wife has a thing for the police shows.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Doesn’t much matter. You know there’s one, someone’s always abducted at the beginning, then the FBI track them down in fifty-nine minutes, minus commercials.”

  We both laughed. “They always get their man?”

  “Sometimes it’s a woman. Now they messed up one episode. A little girl, they didn’t find her, that’s what Dot said. Personally, I couldn’t watch it, I had to leave the room. Put a child in a situation like that on TV, I don’t have the stomach for it.”

  “Do you have children?”

  He looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Three. Three daughters, four grandchildren. Scattered like seeds. They’re out west, Wyoming mostly, we don’t see them as much as we’d like.”

  “You ever worry one would be kidnapped when they were kids?”

  Ken paused. “Tell me, where’s this going?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully.

  “Well, every parent does, imagines a scenario like that. You don’t have children? We had a panic one year. Beautiful girl, cheerleader, abducted outside the mall. Kind of story you don’t forget. She’s kidnapped, missing for weeks, then they find her strangled up near Winnip
esaukee. Hard to talk about now. See, we were advised to make home movies of our kids so they could be shown on the news, that was when the shock really hit, the realization that it could happen to us. We took Julia, our youngest, she’s now got two girls of her own, we took her down to the park in town. I remember I bought a camera specially for it.”

  “Have you ever watched it again?”

  “You know what’s funny, I’ve scavenged for that tape a hundred times. I wanted to show it to my granddaughters, so they’d have proof their mother was a little girl once, too. But I can’t find it for the life of me.”

  In the July/August issue of Neuroscience Report, scientists at the University of Arizona reported employing light-sensitive genes (which were in themselves a marvel: genes that actually could be controlled as easily as light switches) to aid spinal-cord injuries. Using rat models, they’d partly severed the rats’ spinal cords at the second vertebra so that messages couldn’t pass very easily from the brain to the lungs.

  Cornelia no doubt was outside those scientists’ offices that very moment, with a megaphone and a rocket-propelled grenade.

  The rats then had trouble breathing because the lungs weren’t receiving proper instructions, so the scientists injected a protein, channelrhodopsin-2, or ChR2, just below the injury spot. They knew ChR2 would make the correct neurons fire to cause the rats’ lungs to resume pumping, but ChR2 also happened to be light-sensitive. Shine a very, very small flashlight on it, and it got to work. A few days later, and after figuring out exactly when and how frequently to switch on the lights, tests found that the rats’ diaphragms were working properly again. The blood was plenty oxygenated. And after the flashlight was turned off, the rats’ breathing continued normally for thirty-six hours.

  The implications, sitting there on Betsy’s couch, were wild enough to strike me naive. An on/off switch for respiratory function? For anyone with a comparable spinal-cord injury, the idea that someday they could use a miniature flashbulb instead of a respirator would have to be pretty thrilling. Extensions became fresh and green in my imagination. Why not control pain by a switch, why not impotence, why not memory loss?