Even if he wasn’t ashamed of her, if Greta came over there would be layers of interaction. At departmental picnics, it was easy to dodge one-on-one conversations with your friends’ parents. In private, it would not be. “Chitchat.” The word—so flippant—inspired dread in her. It was a talk that required back and forth. The chit—her end, she assumed. And the chat, the response. What the hell would she ask about? “So,” she imagined herself saying to an older-looking version of Max, “your son dropped out of medical school and now he plays with spiders and beetles all day. What’s that like? You super proud?”
Without the silent or otherwise outings with him, a plug loosened in her, and she began to talk at the caregiver meetings. It was more like confession than chitchat. She didn’t want a dialogue or to offer reciprocal questions. It helped not to study the faces of the men and women around the circle. They were too earnest, too hungry, too empathetic. She spoke toward her knees or with her eyes closed. She could have been talking in her sleep. She could have been mumbling on a subway in a foreign country, surrounded by people who didn’t know her language.
* * *
At the third week of cancellations, she didn’t respond to Max’s text. What would she tell him anyway? Weeks passed with so little change in some ways and so much in others. She wanted to show him her ant trap design. Greta modeled her eradication device off bamboo cane. The idea came after watching a nature documentary. What her motel lacked in amenities, it made up for in last-minute flashes of inspiration.
One bottle of wine, ten channels, and a lukewarm shower—that described the average night these days. She had a clear deadline to share a prototype and decided with Brandon on which to move forward with. Though half a sketchbook had lost its life to meandering scribbles, she hadn’t come up with a convincing idea. When the documentary about ants came on, Greta almost shut it off. It was like watching someone reading a children’s book version of her dissertation, but suddenly there was this shot of the inside of a palm plant, teeming with ants, and Greta dropped her remote. It broke, but paying a fee counted among the least of her concerns. She could picture what to make, she knew what would show well at a huge international conference, and she knew that if she pulled it off, she was going to be a doctor, dammit. If the price of that knowledge included a universal remote, well, she could stand that.
She brought the trap into work and stood it on Brandon’s desk. It wobbled unsteadily for a moment, then settled. She’d used the chop saw station at Lowe’s on her own, and somehow her high school shop lessons hadn’t stuck well enough to make a clean cut in the ductwork. Whatever. It was just a prototype. She saw Brandon’s sign on the floor in the room, nearly identical to an apiary box. She also knew immediately that Brandon should know that would never work. Brandon didn’t even need convincing. Hers was placed in the exhibit in the highest area of ant concentration.
After they anchored her prototype in place, Brandon placed a hand on her shoulder. “Nice work, Gret.”
She was almost glad then not to be seeing Max. She couldn’t tell Max about the warmth of Brandon’s hand on her shoulder, the sudden clench in her body like it was trying to staunch a wound. She couldn’t tell him because she didn’t know what it meant. And she didn’t know what it meant to worry what Max thought of her crush.
* * *
The hospital conference room smelled like cigarette butts. It wasn’t the room’s fault that the percolator broke during the first pot of coffee in the most dramatic way possible: exploding. The nozzle mechanism had failed during brewing and leaked hot coffee everywhere, including onto the power cord still plugged into the wall. Luckily, no fire alarms—they would have cued a hospital-wide alarm. Greta imagined the chaos of trying to evacuate a hospital—birthing women, kids recovering from appendectomies, men limping fresh from their vasectomies. “Blame it on bad coffee, gentlemen,” Greta could say, watching them careen out of the whooshing front doors, holding their junk.
The meeting’s drink offerings became limited to powdered lemonade. Greta grabbed a lukewarm glass and swirled the cup to dissolve more of the sugar. Pam settled next to her, and soon it was time for centering and silence.
Over the past two months, Greta had learned to let the touchy-feely language of the sessions dink off her shield without noticing it. During centering, Greta still didn’t bow her head like the others. The gesture always made her aware of her nose. Fluids wanted to flow from her nasal cavity in the recycled air of the conference room. Instead, she eyed the crowns of her groupmates. Bodies, from the insect to the human and anything in between, could be discussed in two ways: morphology and anatomy. Morphology detailed external characteristics. As she gazed, she saw that some of the men had thinning hair; some women had roots long unattended and growing in a highlighter of white. The anatomy described the internal. Brains, those dripping cavities. She hadn’t been able to completely not listen to these people over the past few months, so she knew that in those skulls thoughts about sick wives and husbands, parents and children loomed large. Thoughts didn’t fit into either category—harder to map, like the clouds that obscure views on an island.
A door squeaked and heads came up, a bit too early for Pam’s liking. The facilitator was particular about timing, especially for silences. She shot a glance to the door, and Greta saw her face soften. “Welcome,” she said.
Greta reflexively turned as well. She knew it was an inborn habit, some long-lasting remnant of the fight-or-flight response, but her heart hammered as Meg walked into the room.
Meg caught Greta’s glance—or glare. She knew Meg did, but still Meg accepted the seat Pam offered right between her and Greta. “Thanks,” Meg said with a forced exclamation mark at the end. She wore a pair of thick-rimmed glasses high on her thin nose. Meg didn’t wear glasses. If Greta thought of this woman as the possibly un-evil twin of Meg, maybe she could stay. Greta’s mental gymnastics were about as stellar as her actual gymnastics skills had been, unfortunately.
Pam started the group off, just like on Greta’s first night there. Greta suspected it was all a ploy to get the new person to talk. She saw it transparently now. Make the newbie feel like the room was so full of other people’s stories that their own felt safe to tell—like pee in the swimming pool. No one will notice if someone just lets it out. Well, hell if it hadn’t eventually worked on Greta too. Each of the circle members was sharing additional details that Meg wouldn’t know were for her benefit, defining the characters in their individual dramas. Greta caught herself glancing at Meg out of the corner of her eye, watching her fold and unfold her hands like bird wings.
The man next to Greta—Tim-with-the-lymphoma-daughter—finished up. In a bigger city, these groups would all be sorted more rigorously. All brain injury, all heart attacks, all cancer, but Greta liked the ragged mix of horror that could happen to the human body. It felt more honest, less likely to lead to one-upmanship. My cancer is worse than your …
Greta’s concentration broke as she felt the weight of expectation shift to her. She swallowed. “Pass.”
“That’s your right,” Pam said, even as her tone undermined that.
“Pass,” she repeated.
“Well, welcome to the group, Megan. If you’d like to share anything with us tonight, we’d love to hear about you. If not, know that you’re free to pass.”
Greta thought about how hard Pam had pushed her on her first night to say something. Old Pam was losing her touch. She made a mental bet about whether alternate-universe Meg would talk—Megan, she would be called. Or Nag-em. That was pretty good. She hadn’t quite figured out what side of the bet she would take before Meg spoke.
“Hi, I’m Meg.”
The group repeated her name and a greeting like they were working toward their next sobriety chip.
“I’m here for Danny,” Meg said. She assumed it meant something. Meg probably saw a flicker of recognition in Pam’s face. “Danny’s therapy is going well, or so the experts tell me. They say his dexterity is
good and he can skip again as of last week, but it wasn’t like that was a skill he missed, you know?”
Pam chuckled, and Meg gave her the barest smile. “The problem is that I don’t know how to make him better. The parts of him that don’t skip. I mean, I talked to Nadine, and she suggested …” Meg gestured around the room, took a breath. “Sorry. I’m not making a lot of sense.”
“Take your time,” one of the men said.
It was Greta’s time too. Her time. “Maybe I do want to say something,” Greta said in the silence that followed.
Pam, whose patient grin usually refused to waver, frowned. “You had a chance. Let Meg talk.”
“Because Meg will air Danny’s dirty laundry? Because she can leave if she wants to, but he’s my blood?”
The room iced over like a pond, a thin solid coat on top with roiling movement underneath. “Greta,” Pam said, her voice calm but loud. The tone that said she saw someone double-dipping at the picnic and to knock it off. “Give her a chance.”
Greta hadn’t realized how far forward she sat in her chair, a woman on a ledge about to jump. She closed her eyes and raised her eyebrows in a single gesture, simultaneously as dismissive as it was permissive.
Meg spoke, slowly at first. “We made microwave popcorn the other night. He started to be able to watch movies on our big screen again—they made him motion sick before, and the music …”
Meg rubbed her eyes under her glasses with her thumb and forefinger. With the glasses replaced, she started again like she couldn’t work without that gear engaged. “Well, anyway, he said he could make the popcorn. Swore up and down and sideways he could do it himself. I sit on the couch—literally the other room—and I hear the plastic open, and I think, Good. The microwave opened, and I heard that too. You tune in for the noises, you know? You think yourself through the process from the other room and you just wait.”
“And you hold your breath,” Pam said. Greta noticed no one yelled at her at for interrupting.
“Exactly,” Meg said, and the relief in her voice was so thick it made Greta hate the story before it even was told. “And I heard the beep of the buttons and then the pop of the popcorn. Pop pop pop, and I heard this big noise, and I knew it wasn’t popcorn. I go running in, and there’s Danny on his knees in front of the microwave with his hands over his ears.”
Greta sat with her shoulders so high they nearly covered her ears. She didn’t want to think of Danny and Meg alone in their apartment. She pictured them as a music box that turned on when opened, their figures moving about in her viewing.
Meg kept on talking, quieter but faster. Unspooling. “And I thought maybe something was wrong. Another aneurysm maybe. I hit the ‘Cancel’ button on the microwave, and the popping eased off, and after a minute he stares up at me and says, ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ And he was mad I stopped it because the pain would have stopped in a few minutes, he said. I told him, ‘It’s just popcorn. I don’t need popcorn,’ and we ended up not watching the movie at all because he was so tired. I was too honestly. And I feel so guilty. I don’t want to fight. I won’t fight with him.”
“Why not?” Greta asked. The question was out of her mouth before she could stop herself.
“What do you mean?” Meg asked. She turned sideways in the chair to fully face Greta.
If Meg didn’t understand that to fight was to claim someone as equal, she wouldn’t explain it to her. The opposite of love wasn’t hate, but apathy. She’d gotten at least a “C” in philosophy class. “He’s not a child. He deserves to know what you think.”
“You don’t get it,” Meg said.
Greta thought she did, though. She thought Meg treated Danny like a project, not a person. He was getting better every day. Maybe he was different from before, but he was still Danny. “Never mind.”
Meg glanced back down at her hands. “We’re making it work. We will make it work.”
Pam wrapped an arm around Meg’s shoulders, squeezed them. Greta felt a ghost squeeze on her own shoulders. That touch from months ago, that warmth that drove her away—Greta felt the lack of it now, a phantom coldness.
Fuck this, she thought. Or said. She didn’t know which. A minute later, she was in the hospital corridor, with the burnt smell of coffee sunk into her clothes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Even after living at the motel for so long, the room hadn’t gotten any homier. In those moments between closing her eyes and unconsciousness, Greta wondered whether, if her father had still been alive, she would have returned home to live with him through this saga. After Martha left, the three of them moved into a trailer and got a cat. Greta tried to convince herself she never missed their old house, an old clapboard thing with dingy curtains and rolling carpets. The trailer was newer, and while there was a certain chemical stringency in the air originally, weeks of waffles, frozen pizzas, and deodorant quickly wore it out.
The neighboring trailers had window boxes of daisies and kids riding tricycles in the alleys. If location were everything, their trailer had it all. Close enough to the railroad tracks to have the omnipresent white noise. Walking distance from the metalworking shop where their father plied his trade, and the last stop on/first stop off the bus route to the high school. The cat Greta could have lived without, but it wandered into the trailer court on the day they moved in and survived until the week before her father died, like it knew its reason for being there had ended. Moving from having their own rooms to sharing was easy in retrospect, though tough at the time. Their old house hadn’t been large, but it had space enough to keep their interests separate. Danny’s music sounded louder in a smaller space, so he had to join garage bands with his friends who had garages. Greta’s bug collection could remain as long as she kept only dead specimens.
If Dad had been alive when Danny had his aneurysm, she wouldn’t have come home at all. Or she might have come and left again. Found the money somehow and fled. Instead, she had scratchy sheets and ex-boyfriend woes and the constant weight of the unknown in her brother’s skull. She couldn’t parent a brother. Her father had barely parented, or he did so with such a light touch that their choices seemed recklessly independent to her now. Perhaps she could notice now the feather-light influence her father had on their college choices and afterschool activities. It wasn’t that their father was distant; he was close. He never left the house after work and waited up for them when they went out.
Once, she had snuck out to the state park at night to walk in the woods, only to return home to her father waiting in the threadbare recliner in the front room, his stubble visibly longer than at dinnertime. He grew facial hair like a chia pet—vigorous and thick and weedy. He had to shave twice daily to prevent a full beard. That night, when she got home, he hadn’t said anything to her, hadn’t mentioned time or curfews, only acknowledged her presence and gone to bed.
Few insects demonstrated paternal care, but Greta remembered one from a research expedition to Montana during her second year. Seven grad students piled into a university van and went off for a long weekend of hands-and-knees exploration. Brandon had driven them, thrilled to show off his home state and thrumming with excitement at the crossing of each state line. She and Max had played license plate bingo in the far back seat. After their arrival, they’d camped in a wilderness area near a creek bed. On the first morning, Greta saw a Lethocerus americanus, a giant water bug. He was truly giant at four inches. His carapace was light brown, with mandibles like fork tines protruding from his head. Greta followed his limited route to and from the bank, where he guarded tiny, marble-like eggs laid on a patch of weeds. Every so often, he splashed the eggs to prevent desiccation. Greta snapped a picture of the male, refusing to add it to her kill jar. She didn’t want to strand the eggs. In other orders, in other places, male water bugs carried their eggs on their backs. It prevented flight and further mating, but it protected the eggs.
When her grandfather died, her father sold the fishing boat. Even boatless, they
still went to the lake each summer. By the time Grandpa had died, a few months after Martha left, she and Danny had grown out of Marco Polo-ing. Instead, they used to sit beside Dad on the dock, their toes lightly resting on the top of the water, as if feet would bait the fish. Each of them had a pole threaded into the water. Danny was always indifferent to getting a catch, his hands metronoming the pole side to side gently. Greta grew more interested in the darting dragonflies and water striders. Surface tension made water particles cling together like film on the top of pudding, providing enough substance to let the water striders pull a Jesus and walk on water. They looked almost like ice skaters, four skinny legs dimpling the lake surface. How easy they made it seem to run away.
Often during those summer days, she brought a jar to catch a strider, but they evaded her. Once, her eyes were so focused on them, she nearly lost a pole when a fish tugged the line. When she finally caught a strider, it lapped the surface of an aluminum nine-by-thirteen-inch pan on the counter of the trailer’s galley kitchen. Danny watched over her shoulder as she tested a hypothesis. She took the dish soap from beside the sink and let a single drop fall into the pan. It was enough to break the surface tension, and suddenly the strider was Jack in Titanic, without a door in sight. She caught the thing on the tip of a pencil before it could drown, and let it out in a puddle outside.
That tension. The tension of the line with the fish, the water surface for the striders, the card tower on Meg’s table.
A breath hitched in Greta’s chest, and she opened her eyes. She would never get to sleep. She propped herself up on elbows and considered the clock. Past midnight, and that meant they were a year older. Before Meg, she used to call Danny at midnight on their birthday. After Meg, she was always there with him. Hadn’t that been the silent accusation in the hospital conference room? “I’m always there,” Meg seemed to say. “You’re not really there, Greta. You’re not there.”
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