Arcadia

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Arcadia Page 25

by Lauren Groff


  Bit picks his mother up. He expects her to be light, but she is dense and he almost drops her. With great effort, he carries her into the bathroom. Whoa, he says. Grete has loaded the water with so much bubblebath that the foam is already a foot high.

  What? she says. She smells bad. No offense, Grannah, but you stink.

  You stink, whispers Hannah. She is crying. Both of you. You stink.

  Together, Bit and his daughter unzip the dress and pull it down over Hannah’s arms and belly. They peel off the support garments unseen in the world for ten years: a bra pointy as a pair of missiles, sad orangey hose, a potato sack for underwear. They help her into the tub, bending her stiff limbs. She is still wearing the pearl necklace that Abe gave her on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. She was almost angry with him that night, saying it was wasteful, asking if she was the kind of woman who’d wear pearls. Everyone at the table had suppressed a grin. With the pearls around her neck, the shadow Hannah became visible, the debutante who lived in the old hippie. Had she fallen in love with a different kind of man, Hannah would now be hosting Derby parties, getting tipsy on juleps and wondering why the world felt so hollow under her well-gilded knuckles.

  Bit tries not to see what he has already seen, that her right leg and arm have atrophied and twisted. The left arm is going that way, also. There is a strange gray tone to her skin.

  Hannah hides her face in the bubbles. Grete builds devil horns on her head. And Bit takes the warm washcloth and slides it along his mother’s body to scrub away the stink of her mourning. When he is cleaning her feet, Hannah lifts her face and it is featureless as an Amish doll under the scrim of soap. Grete gently clears her eyes and mouth of the suds. Bad girl, she leaves the horns.

  Clean, now, Hannah is at the table. Her hair is dried and braided, and she is in an ancient sweatsuit so soft it felt like her own skin when Bit put it on her. She manages an avocado–soy cheese melt and some chai. Bit puts on an old record, and while Joan Baez warbles through the house, Grete escapes for another run in the dusk. When her footsteps have gone, Hannah turns on Bit. This is cruel, she says. Her tongue is thick in her mouth, her muscles spasming in her chin. She says, Selfish of you to make me go through this.

  Selfish, he repeats, very softly. A daddy longlegs skirts the edge of sun on the linoleum.

  When he responds, much later, it is toward the kitchen window. The world held in a frame calms him: the sparrows darting over the green fields, the last flush of Arcadia House through the maple trunks. That small square is all he can take, just now.

  When I was little, he says. When you’d grow sad and tired and sleep all the time in the winter, I used to watch you just lying there. In the summer, you were so loud and golden and happy, and suddenly one day you’d just go away. You’d become this pale changeling in place of my mother. It was so cold in the Bread Truck. Unless Abe came home early, I didn’t eat anything from breakfast to dinner. Sometimes I tried to kiss you out of it, but I never was enough, I could never get you to wake up. Deep down, I was sure it was my fault.

  It wasn’t your fault, she snaps. And it wasn’t my fault, if you’re trying to say that I was being selfish. It was brain chemistry. You of all people know this, Bit.

  He looks at her. Her jaw is set: she is fighting hard. In the window, the world is blue.

  All those times, you took yourself away, he says. All I wanted was for you to come back.

  He watches her try to pick the crumbs from the table with the fleshy pad of her palm. She gives up, and her hand curls beside the porcelain.

  But I did, she says. Come back. This time too. You weren’t there, you didn’t see it. There was a sea. It was very warm. I was holding Abe. Then the waves worked their way in between us and he drifted out. I tried to swim for him, but he was gone. I came back.

  They hear Grete on the porch, stomping the mud from her running shoes. She is singing something in the off-pitch voice Helle gave her. In the dim at the kitchen table, Bit and Hannah both wince.

  I’m too tired, Hannah says, under her breath. I’m too tired, Bit.

  If not for me, Bit says quick and low, for Grete.

  His daughter is a silhouette in the screen. Hannah reaches out and touches Bit’s cheek with her good hand. Grete runs in. She drops onto Hannah’s plate what Bit sees is a handful of wild narcissus, ripped from the ground, bulbs and all. Grannah, she shouts, her cheeks pink with delight. Flowers! In February!

  Hannah smiles. It is a dry, unconvincing smile, but she takes a tiny pale bloom from the clump and puts it on the back of Bit’s hand. For you, she says. Then Hannah asks Grete about her day and Grete’s face lights up lovely under her grandmother’s attention, and Bit leaves the flower where it is until his hand jerks in revolt.

  They take walks. Twice a day, they go out, and Hannah stumbles against Bit; at first, she can only make it to Midge’s before she collapses into the weather-beaten lawn chair in front of the cave-house. She peers at her feet and says, Come on, you old clodhoppers, and heaves herself up and painfully presses on. She insists on showering alone. She dresses herself; it takes an hour. She swallows her antidepressants, pain relievers, laxatives, one by one, choking them down with a look of dour satisfaction. She goes to the bathroom; it takes a half an hour, and she comes out trailing toilet paper on her shoe. Fierce, now, she is grabbing what she can to her. Soon enough, you’ll help, she tells Bit. Soon enough.

  Alone at night in the stark room where he sleeps, Bit dreams of the city. It is depopulated, shining with wet. The streets are long and gray, and the shop windows are so glorious they fill him with wonder: the mannequins are luminous, at the near cusp of human, their clothes made of cut paper, a pane of glass away from dissolving in the rain. As he walks, he hears noises behind him drawing nearer: the click of nails, indrawn breath, the slide of something heavy against a wall. But when he turns, there is always the street stretching behind him into the dark and nothing moves, and he is alone and not alone, and frozen in horror.

  Grete goes to school. Already thin, she grows skinny. For a week, he presses his ear to her door as she sobs into a pillow. She is always on Hannah’s telephone, her cell not working in these wilds. Her friends must grow tired of her sadness, though, and Grete begins leaving more messages than talking. When they ignore her for days at a time, he wishes he could march them all off a gangplank. Pirate Bit with the baby face; just wound his daughter and see how savage he can be.

  The doctor calls, and her smooth voice calms Bit for hours afterward.

  Cheryl and Diana visit; the ladies Hannah volunteered with at the library visit; Hannah’s many friends from town visit. Jincy and the boys come up for an afternoon. They play in Titus’s treehouse, and when they come out their faces are swollen and red. At dinner, the twins cling to Hannah, kissing her cheeks over and over until Jincy calls them off. Let the woman eat, she says, and they all watch breathlessly as Hannah maneuvers a cherry tomato to the side of her mouth, slides it along her lips, finally gets it in.

  Goal, she says, to make the boys laugh.

  When Jincy says goodbye, she whispers, This’ll be the last time for a while. My friend at the Times says it’ll be a matter of days before we’re all on quarantine. She kisses him on the nose and says, I’m not surprised you found the safest place to be when the shit hits the fan.

  Stay here, he says. Be safe. But she shakes her head sadly. Our life is elsewhere.

  In the afternoon, when Bit and his daughter are in town at the pharmacy, Grete begs for a twenty and buys something that she hides in her backpack. When she comes out to dinner, her hair has changed to an inky black, blue swoops of dye still on the pale skin of her forehead. She stares at Hannah and Bit, daring them to say something.

  Hannah puts down her forkful of pasta. Black, she says thoughtfully. It sets off your beautiful green-gold eyes, Grete. Grete scowls, pleased. Hannah negotiates the fork almost into her mouth, missing, and all three watch the linguine slowly unthread itself from the tines and slide
back onto the plate. Meals these days have become thrillers. Here, Grannah, Grete says and twists her fork into the slippery noodles, and Bit watches, fighting to stay in his seat, as his daughter feeds his mother bite by careful bite.

  Grete gazes out the window with the smell of bad Chinese takeout tendriling toward them from the backseat and says, In gym today we had to run a mile. And I beat everyone, even the boys. She says it indifferently but doesn’t exhale, waiting for him to speak.

  I was fast when I was your age, too, he says.

  She gazes at her fingernails, says, It’s dumb, but the coach wants me to run Varsity.

  Bit says, How exciting.

  She turns to him. But Dad, it means that you’re the only one all day long with Grannah. It’s too much, two extra hours every day. You look awful already.

  Thanks, he says. Punk.

  I mean it, she says. I think I have to say no.

  You’ll have to say yes. It would make me happy to watch you run, Bit says. It would make Hannah happy to see you use those healthy young legs of yours. He imagines his mother stuck in her renegade body, watching Grete whipping around a track. It could be painful, the juxtaposition between her imprisonment and Grete’s freedom. But he says, She’ll live through you, and hopes it is true when Grete turns away to hide her smile against the window, her tattletale arms pricked with goosebumps.

  Bit is woken by a rasp. It is Luisa’s night off, and at first he thinks it’s the wind against the screen. He sits, heart thrumming in his ears. The sound is coming from the room next door. He hurries over the rough planks into Hannah’s room. Even in the shadows, he can see she’s rigid with terror; when he turns on the light, her face is bluish. He pulls her to sitting, and supports her body as she gasps deeper, calming, quieting. He puts pillows behind her back and props her against the headboard.

  Oh, Bit, she says. Can’t sit up. No air.

  Scary, he says.

  Stupid, she spits. Her fear has disintegrated into fury, he sees. She says, Wasted your potential, Bit. All your life tried to make people whole. What you could have done. If you didn’t have to nurse everyone. Helle, Grete, me. Students. You could have been an artist.

  He says, very quietly, I am an artist.

  She flicks her good hand at him but says no more. When her eyelids grow heavy and her head nods forward, he goes to the kitchen and finds the number that the lovely doctor at the hospital had scrawled on a napkin and pressed into his hand. He feels sick to call her so late; his heart beats in his throat. But she answers on the first ring. She is calm and clear, and there is only the smallest touch of sleep in her voice. He imagines her bedroom, spare and neat, imagines the straps of a chemise slipping from her shoulders. I’m so glad you called, she says warmly and makes sympathetic noises as he talks.

  He looks at Hannah sleeping in the light of her bedside lamp. He feels how, out in the night, his sadness is prowling, watching the one lit window in the Green house, biding its time.

  It’s like she’s slowly turning into a lump of clay, he says. A piece of rock.

  Well, the doctor says and hesitates. He can hear a whine in the background, and Bit feels ashamed, thinking it’s a newborn—what a pervert he is! of course, she has a family!—but she says, Down, Otto, and he smiles to know it’s a dog. She says, Your mother’s not yet made out of stone. Not yet.

  He is too tired to sleep, and sits under an old comforter on a rocking chair on the porch, watching the dawn slip in. He can’t remember the last time he quietly watched this drama unfold; what could possibly seem so important that it kept him from doing this? When did he become a person who stopped noticing? First the moon dims, and in the east there’s a slit in the belly of the sky. A trickle of light pours over the hills, over the Amish farms, over the country roads, over the limit of Arcadia, the miles and miles of forest, startling the songbirds and lighting the dew from within. He thinks of Linnaeus’s flower clock blooming the hours, chicory to dandelion to water lily to pimpernel, a gentler way to live time. In a breath, the day is full upon him. Hannah is calling him weakly from her bed, and in her voice he can hear the apology he wasn’t expecting he’d so badly need.

  The doctor’s car is mud-spattered when she pulls up. Through the windshield, they grin at one another, and neither stops smiling when she gets out. They hug: her thinness beneath his arms, her cold hands. His mother is in a slice of sun on the porch. Hannah’s eyes flick, amused, from Bit’s face to the doctor’s and back, when the doctor does her exam.

  But the more questions Hannah answers, the more serious the doctor looks, until she makes Hannah breathe into a machine. A spirometer, she explains. To measure forced vital capacity. When Hannah does the test again lying down, the doctor’s face turns grim. Without her permanent smile, she seems older than he thought: early thirties, not late twenties. Ms. Stone, she says, severely. Are you still against treatment? Riluzole, stem-cell therapies?

  Ameliorative, yes, Hannah says. Palliative, she says, and pauses. Then she says, Hell, bring on the morphine.

  The doctor relaxes. Good, she says. Martyrdom is overrated.

  Hannah laughs aloud, the first clear Hannah laugh Bit has heard for so long. For some, she says. For my son, it’s as natural as breathing.

  This time, the critique is infused with warmth. In Bit, though, a flash of bitterness like a bird winging away. Unfair, he says. She winks, and he can almost hear her say Not untrue.

  Speaking of breathing, the doctor says and clips off to her car. She is so small and tidy; he thinks of a lithe brown cat. He avoids Hannah’s knowing grin. The doctor returns, bearing a pamphlet. I’m going to have you fitted for a BiPAP, she says to Hannah, so you can breathe better while you sleep. You almost scared your son to death last night.

  She is finished with the exam but seems loath to go and Hannah asks about the pandemic. The doctor shrugs. SARI, she says. What a name. Makes you wonder who’s in charge. She sits on the steps and talks about quarantine, online tracking of the disease, precautions. I wear a mask in the hospital now, she admits. Everyone does. Mostly, it seems to be killing the immune-compromised, newborns and the old and the sick. Some healthy adults. But the onset is sudden, within an hour or two. I came here straight from my house without seeing anyone on the way. When she smiles, small parentheses go white around her mouth. She touches Hannah’s hand. If I ever suspect I could be carrying it, of course I won’t come out. I wouldn’t risk your health.

  If you have it, Hannah jokes, come straight here. Save us all some time.

  Bit studies the pamphlet in his hands. Death by pandemic and death by ALS: severe pneumonia in both cases, Hannah drowning in the sea of her own lungs. But between slowly being mired in her body and a half-day drowning, she may be right. Quicker might be better.

  He hears a clip-clop down the drive and looks up. An Amish buggy among the maples. Hannah peers, shields her eyes with her hand. What a day, she says.

  The buggy comes to a halt, and the saucer-faced woman from Abe’s memorial service climbs down from her bench and ties the horse to a tree. Glory, Hannah calls out, and at first, Bit thinks it’s an expostulation, but the woman gives a wave. She comes up the porch steps, a pie wrapped in a dishtowel still steaming in her hands. She places the pie gently on Hannah’s lap. Her eyes are sad, though, and skitter off Hannah’s face.

  Hannah reaches with her good hand and grasps the woman’s wrist. She says, gazing up at her Amish friend, You young people, take a walk up to Arcadia House until lunch. It seems I need to do a little work at redemption here.

  Indeed, the little Amish woman says in a low and guttural voice. You do.

  The sun is hot on Bit’s shoulders. The doctor’s fine, tiny sandals are caked with mud, and Bit wants to take them in his hands and beat them clean on the grass. There is dirt worked into the cleavage between her toes. His own are irritated in sympathy, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Bit and the doctor walk up the ancient slate steps. They don’t talk until they are standing on the porch, gazin
g at the gnarled apples on the Terraces below. Leif had planted saplings on the lowest level, replacing the trees so antique they no longer fruited, but the young trees were chewed to nubs by starved deer, and now the Terraces are scribbled with brush.

  The doctor tucks a wisp of hair behind her ear, her hands shaking a little, and a warmth starts in Bit’s stomach and spreads. This place, she says. My uncle said that for a while after the commune broke up, high school kids came up here to fool around. There was this story about these two kids who looked up in the middle of getting it on to find a scary huge hippie with an ax glowering at them.

  That would be Titus, Bit says, stinging at the thought of his old friend.

  Then, of course, the film company came, the doctor says. We used to take field trips out in elementary school. All the other kids on the planet wanted to be rap stars and marine biologists, but we wanted to be animators. Everyone had a crush on that blond CEO. I used to dream I was married to him and rode around on horses out here all day long.

  That was Leif, Bit says. His sister was my wife.

  Oh. Her eyes scan his face, and he can see her decide not to ask about the was, or about the wife. She says, It was pretty traumatic for Summerton when the company left the area. We were just getting a downtown back, then it died again like every other town around here. I had a clinic for a little while, but it closed and I had to move to Rochester.

  It was in Leif’s will for the company to stay here, Bit said. But you know stockholders.

  What ever happened to him? she says. Nobody in town really knew. You should have heard the stories. He was eaten by a bear, he was extradited by Homeland Security. It was nuts.

  The truth is weirder. He was lost in a high-altitude balloon, Bit says. That family has a genius for disappearing. He looks at her profile, the teeth caught on her lower lip, the crow’s-feet as she squints out toward the hills. My wife disappeared, too, he says. Eleven years ago. She went for a walk and never came back.

 

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