by Julia Glass
Michael groaned. “Oh Dad, please don’t start with the yard sale threats. That may have worked on Mom, but it won’t work on me. Stop covering up for her! We have to find a real life for her—I’m talking about what’s good for Saga. You think you’re protecting her, but you’re not. You’re only postponing the hard facts of reality here. I never agreed with you when—”
Uncle Marsden cleared his throat loudly. “So! So let me see, what’s good for Saga is to respect the varnish on the furniture?”
Michael uttered a noise of strangled frustration, and Denise said, “Calm down, sweetie. You had a very stressful day.”
Michael had an all-around very stressful life, as far as Saga could tell, and only by choice. He was some kind of money trader in the city, and when he wasn’t arguing with his father, he was on the phone reciting numbers. His wife wanted babies—everyone could see that from the way she looked at the visiting grandchildren who ran in and out of Commodore Perry’s house across the street all summer long—and Saga suspected there was some kind of tension for Michael there, too. She could feel it in the air around that couple when they were together, just the way you could feel fear or shame or rage in the air around a dog. None of Saga’s cousins had children; Frida and Pansy weren’t even married, though they were both past thirty. Saga knew they weren’t happy about this, either. Uncle Marsden, on the other hand, seemed oblivious; he loved and tended his plants. At his age, that was nurture enough. He’d had his children late, he told Saga, and never assumed that grandchildren were part of his life package. Nor would he pry into what he considered his children’s private lives. Saga wouldn’t have contradicted him there, but sometimes she got the feeling that Pansy and Frida felt neglected by their father, that they wished he would pry. She’d seen them trade pointed looks at the dinner table when Uncle Marsden did not pursue certain topics they brought up on their own.
While Michael had been in the study that previous weekend, having his outburst, Saga had been in the kitchen, peeling onions for dinner. Quietly, she’d gone to the mudroom, put on her jacket, and walked down the road toward the beach. Michael’s temper was quick; if she came back in an hour, he’d behave nicely toward her, or he’d be on the phone spouting his numbers, and Denise would compliment her on the soup, and things would be…civil. After dinner, Frida and Pansy would get out the Scrabble board. It was a custom that went back to their teenage summers, when the three girls hung about on the porch in their wet, sandy bathing suits. Now they’d insist that Saga take a thirty-point handicap. She still liked playing, but words could be devilish: when she searched hard for one, sometimes the effort unleashed a whipcrack of too many other, unnecessary words. Say she had a V on her rack; her mind could spew forth, too raucously, top speed, vivid, vivacious, verve, valve, vulva, Vesuvius, valorous, voracity, words by the dozen. It was like a crowded escalator when someone who reached the bottom got off but stood still.
Or a single word would pop out in relief, on display, like a peacock fanning its tail. The word would fill her mind for a few minutes with a single color: not an unpleasant sensation but still an intrusion. V a s c u l a r…v i v i s e c t i o n…v a l e d i c t o r y…
On the way to the beach, she had stopped by the culvert, and that was when she had found the puppies. This wasn’t the first litter she’d found there, and sometimes Saga imagined that a rumor had spread: if you had puppies or kittens you had to get rid of, this critter lady down by the beach would pick them up. Saga didn’t know if she liked this idea or not, if she should be angry or relieved.
Because the fact was, if you took them to the nearest animal shelter, the one where she’d made the mistake of taking those poor wild cats she’d betrayed, they would probably be dead inside the week. It was the only shelter for miles around, so it was way overcrowded—and out here, off season, there wasn’t much demand for pets, even for the most adorable puppies. That was how, talking to the one nice guy who worked at the shelter, Saga had heard about Stan and the place in Brooklyn where they kept the animals for however long it took to find them a home, where they never put an animal to sleep unless it was terribly sick or too badly injured. (“They,” as it turned out, was basically Stan.)
The pups had writhed about in their cardboard box, with nothing but a dish towel for warmth. According to the calendar, it was spring, but the wind off the water in the evenings was bitter. Saga tried hard not to think about the puppies’ mother, how desperate she must be to know where they’d gone.
She’d sat on the edge of the damp, cold cement and picked them up, one by one, pressing them against her belly, under her jacket, for a dose of warmth.
“Time for a little commute,” she said as she slowly lifted the box. “No cause for alarm.” Before heading back up the road, she had turned for a moment toward the sea. In the late afternoon light, the water was gray wrinkled with orange. Tiger water, she called it when it looked like that. Rhino water was smooth and leaden, dull as smoke. But her favorite was polar bear water, when the moon hung low and large, as if too heavy to rise very high, and scattered great radiant patches, like ice floes, across a dark blue ocean.
She’d looked all around for the moon, its sly early ghost. Not yet.
“The moon is my friend,” she murmured to the puppies, something she would never have spoken aloud to another person, hadn’t even told the doctors and therapists who swarmed about her for nearly a year. Or at least she didn’t think she had. There was so much she would never remember and so much she would forget again and again.
She had shown the puppies to Uncle Marsden, then taken them out to the garage. There, she had lined a larger box with newspapers and raggedy bath towels, plugged in a heat lamp, and transferred the puppies into their nest of clean, pink warmth. Not a mother, not even close, but better by far than a damp cement cave. She’d fed them warm milk, from the baby bottle she kept in the pantry, then finished making her soup.
At dinner, there’d been discussion of a feud over valuable land not far up the shoreline. A condominium developer had offered a large sum of money to the widow who wanted to sell the land and move to Sarasota. Uncle Marsden’s neighbors, the owners of the biggest houses, were trying to persuade the Nature Conservancy to buy the land, to keep it for the nesting birds—though really what they wanted to keep was their open view.
“Maybe you should just marry her, Dad,” joked Pansy.
“Hoo hoo! My dear, she’s a good fifteen years older than I!”
“Oh, and that’s right. You have Saga after all.” She smiled at Saga. “He doesn’t take advantage, does he?”
Saga blushed. She decided Pansy didn’t mean to embarrass her. “He takes advantage of my housekeeping abilities—such as they are.”
Uncle Marsden frowned at his daughter. “Hanging about with teenagers is making you crude.” Pansy counseled kids in a poor high school, one thing Saga held in her favor no matter what she said—but Uncle Marsden had hoped his children might become academics. None of them had.
“Have a sense of humor, Dad. Studies show it helps keep your arteries open.”
Michael had been mostly absent from the table, making and answering phone calls. Uncle Marsden had learned to ignore his son’s attachment to the phone. Saga imagined that Michael’s attitude toward his clients was like that of a brain surgeon toward his patients: nothing personal, everything dire.
After loading the dishwasher, Saga had played Monopoly with Uncle Marsden, Denise, and Pansy. (Frida lived up in Boston and came down only every couple of months; Pansy lived in New Haven, an hour away, and dropped by most weekends.) She’d let them buy up all the little houses and red hotels so she could go bankrupt first and slip away to bed. Her plan had been to wake up early on Saturday morning, even before her uncle, and she had. She’d eaten a quick breakfast, called Stan, left her note, fed the puppies and cleaned them up, then smuggled them onto the train in her big plumber’s bag. She’d had to stay in the city for a few days—Stan had been elusive—but the corner
she had carved out for herself had made it feel almost perfectly safe.
SHE OFTEN WENT OVER THE AWAKENING, the first memories she had that came after the accident itself. It began with sounds, few and faint, like the sounds of a fish tank. She’d never had an aquarium, but her dentist did; looking at it was supposed to calm you down while you had your teeth cleaned and drilled, your cavities filled. So there in the dark, automatically, she’d thought of her dentist’s office, of the brilliant fish, some blue, some striped black and yellow like waterborne bees. The burblings, watery whispers, and sighs of the machinery and tubing. But she’d known she was not at the dentist.
As her eyes adjusted to the dark, the air about her settled to a tabby gray, lit only by a glow outlining a sharp-edged form that quickly volunteered it was a door.
She was in bed, and her throat hurt, and her head hurt even more. She tried to lift it but couldn’t. From her hips up, she lay on an incline (oh: a hospital bed; a hospital), so she was glad, at least, to be able to make out all of her body in her limited view. Something—a deeply physical reluctance…a drug?—kept her from testing her body, from checking its responses to her brain.
Her brain. Was it her brain that hurt, or was it her skull? Could you tell the difference? Could your skull even hurt?
“Hello?” she tried to call out, but her throat felt swollen, inflamed, and all that emerged was a rasp, like a wooden chair creaking under the weight of a very large man. The effort paved a searing pathway across the back of her head, pain like the rolling out of a brightly colored carpet. Fear rose through her, vertically, sap through a tree.
A tree…something about a tree. Something awful. Very bad news.
Now she saw another source of light: a window, to one side. If she tipped her head just a little to the left—this she could do if she did it slowly—she could look almost straight out the window.
And there was the moon. A warm and visible greeting, a beacon of relief. Full, unshrouded, its edges crisp. It looked like an airy wafer—what were those crackers that came in the big green tin? She stared at the moon and thought about the fact that she was breathing. Fact of breathing, fact of life. This she could control: slow down and speed up her breathing, despite the pain in her throat. She’d never really looked at the moon, never really seen how intricate the etchings on its yellowy silver surface. Bowl of a spoon in candlelight. When she’d looked a long time—I see the moon, and the moon sees me—a glimmering ring like a rainbow materialized at the rim. In the memory she still retained, as clear as a framed snapshot, a portrait worn in a locket, Saga stared at the moon that way for hours, and it kept her company, it kept her sane, it kept her in one piece, it kept her alive. It was proof, fact, patience, faith.
But no, she was told by a doctor sometime later, that wouldn’t have been possible, because nurses checked her room frequently, at least every twenty minutes because her condition had been so severe; surely not much time had passed before the nurse found her conscious and fretful, gave her water and more of the medications designed to lighten her mind, not just her pain.
Over the week that followed the accident, even while she had been in the ICU, she had been conscious several times. This is what her mother told her the next day. But she did not remember those earlier wakings.
What she did remember, as her days in the hospital stretched into weeks, as she discovered that she would have to learn how to use her right arm and leg all over again, was the accident itself. It had been raining hard—a whopper of a storm, her mother’s words—and Saga had been walking alone to her apartment. She carried her black umbrella, she remembered that, the big one with the wooden handle that had belonged to her dad. She watched the ground for puddles because she wasn’t wearing proper boots. The rain was so noisy, the thunder frequent, and one of the cracks she heard must have been not the thunder but the bough that fell, that she could swear she remembered seeing as she dipped the umbrella aside and looked up. She was transfixed, the way you always are by something that looms unexpectedly, that seems to be aiming right for you. More sharply than the sight of that bough, she remembered the sound of it inside her skull, as if her consciousness were the occupant of a very small house and the bough had crashed down on its roof: a universally resounding hollow crack, a muffled gunshot. And she remembered one instant thought: If I die, Mom will be crushed. Because her father had died of cancer the month before.
They told her this was probably a dream she had much later, and for a while she argued with them. Then she pretended to agree. Now she no longer mentioned it to anyone, but it remained a marvel: this crystal-clear memory, like a church bell rising over the din of an entire city, over all the confusion and pain and humiliating inability to recover parts of herself that she could almost recall, that she felt sometimes she was carrying around in her pockets like lovely stones, things you can fondle but never really own.
“Think of your memory as very badly bruised,” one of her therapists had told her early on. “Some of it will recover fully, but some of it could remain permanently numb.”
That wasn’t how Saga saw it. She now thought of her entire memory as a distinct and separate being, with moods and feelings, as if she’d been born into the perfect marriage and then, bingo, the marriage had crumbled into an unpredictably bumpy relationship, but one that could not be severed or traded in for another, no matter how discouraged she became.
She looked at the material world around her and sometimes thought she was making small discoveries. Riding on the train, she’d notice how highway signs were precisely the same green and white as those woven plastic lawn chairs (was that on purpose?), how she felt like a drop of water sliding fast through a long glass tube, how railroad ties were no longer made of dark motley wood but plain old concrete. But perhaps she had known and felt all these things before. At such times, she saw her brain as one of those pocket puzzles composed of numbered square tiles in a grid; the tiles had merely been mixed up like crazy, and now her work was to move them side to side, up and down, till she got them back in order.
Oh but numbers: numbers were one thing that she seemed to have lost almost completely. She knew what they were, she could count and tell time, all that; but when she looked at actual numbers—at those figures, whether on paper or on a street door or on one of those traveling headlines on the stock market channel that Michael kept on the TV during his visits—they were mostly meaningless. She knew them as words—seven or two and a half or three thousand six hundred and seventy-four—but as symbols on bank statements and grocery receipts, they were, except in rare eureka glimpses, little more than rows of tiny ballet dancers. Uncle Marsden had bought her a wristwatch, large and sleek, where all the numbers were represented by their names, and he made her a card—of which he had dozens printed—bearing a chart that read: 0 zero 1 one 2 two and so on. When people gave her phone numbers, she could rewrite them as words. Laborious, but it worked.
Words, they were more unpredictable, more fickle. At times, she could actually sense the voids, nearly palpable, where reservoirs of words had deserted her mind. The three years of French she had taken, though what she had learned was no doubt elementary, had mostly fled as well. But then, like windows into the past, there would be periods when all of Saga’s non-numerical knowledge felt harmonious, when words, at least in her own language, came easily without falling into torrents, when events for days on end seemed as clear and orderly as pictures in an album, when she could open the refrigerator without encountering a box of cherry tomatoes or a jar of mustard she had bought the day before and regarding its presence there as a baffling surprise.
SHE WAITED NEARLY TWO WEEKS before she went into the city again. She would meet Stan, she reminded herself as the train pulled into Grand Central, and then she would stop by to see that Alan fellow, the one who’d offered so kindly to pay for the vaccinations. (Stan, of course, had seen the offer as suspicious.) She couldn’t remember his face, but she remembered his help and that he had given her a cup of tea
. If it got too late, she would spend the night in her secret place. It was warm today, really warm for a change, and she had remembered to bring her sleeping roll. She liked the open sky when it was nice out. That night, the moon would be nearly full. She had checked the calendar.
Before leaving home, she always wrote her day’s plans, step by step, in the notebook she carried. There were things she’d forget anyway, things she’d skip over, but later she’d know about it.
This time, as promised, Stan was where they’d agreed to meet, by the arch in Washington Square.
“Here they are,” he said, without any kind of hello. She didn’t blame him that he wasn’t friendly. She no longer took it personally, since she’d seen him with other people and this was simply how he was.
She looked at the flyers Stan had printed. “You did a nice job,” she said. “Color copies are expensive.”
“Yeah, well, let’s just say my butt is crapola if my division manager checks the counter on that machine. So you know where to put them up?”
“East from here over to Avenue B, come back through SoHo, then up west. Okay?” She would take most of the flyers to the veterinary clinics and the pet supply shops in those neighborhoods. Others she’d put up in cafés and college buildings that let outsiders put things up on their bulletin boards. She kept a map with every one of these places marked—though she’d never have shown it to Stan. Saga knew that Stan wasn’t well liked, not personally, but people liked what he did. He didn’t care one way or the other—“Life ain’t no popularity contest,” he’d say—but he knew it was best if other people did the footwork. He didn’t have the time, and he was prone to picking arguments with people who, as he put it, deluded themselves into thinking they were animal lovers when an animal, to them, was little more than a fashion statement, a bed warmer, or a creature to boot around in this miserable world.
He handed her the list of vets, the places she had to go. “Think your scrambled brains can handle this?”