Since most of the Dementia Ward nurses are in the dining room with patients, Elise has a clear shot down the hall. She makes it all the way to the main desk without incident, then stops, baffled, trying to remember which passage she took the time she came upon Robert Graham Mood. She recalls a different kind of fluorescent light, bluer than usual, a lower ceiling. That’s the one, she thinks, the one with the green wall. Elise ambles down the hall, finds the library. Over by the front desk, a solitary CNA reads a magazine.
Elise recognizes the corridor down which that bitch of a nurse took her husband, a man she thought was dead. She ambles down the hallway, peeks into dim rooms, sees lumps curled on beds, aged figures zoned out before televisions. When a wheelchair emerges from one of the doorways, her heart catches, but it’s not Robert Graham Mood. She keeps walking as though she knows where she’s going, nods whenever she passes a nurse. The hallway narrows. At the end of the hall, she spots a nurses’ station around the corner, the CNA at the desk bent over a gadget.
Elise squats, scampers like a crab around the desk, almost laughing at the ease of it, and enters the little hall where the severely disabled are stashed away. She sniffs, the burn of disinfectant stronger here. And then she peers into each room until she finds him, three doors down on the left, her husband, Bob, drooping in his wheelchair before a muted TV.
She remembers that summer—when the stubble on his face grew into a dirty beard and his sideburns fanned into wild whiskers. Jimmy Carter was floundering, the oil running out, those hostages still rotting in Iran. And Bob, TV-obsessed, sat wordless as a bear. Soviets in Afghanistan and J. R. Ewing shot and Bob’s legs as weak as they were the day before. She couldn’t keep up with the okra picking. Blight had taken the tomatoes. One of their hens had an abscess that needed to be lanced. It wasn’t Bob’s sick legs that had pushed her over the edge, but his refusal to talk about the details of their shared life.
Elise steps between Bob and the TV, just like she did that day in July when she’d had enough of his silence.
His eyes stray from the screen—still the strange green, steeped in obscure feelings.
“Robert Graham Mood,” she says. And he blinks.
“Elise.” His voice rattles like a rusty cotton gin, but to her the word sounds exquisitely feminine, the name of some flower that blooms for just half a day, almost too small to see but insanely perfumed in the noon heat.
“How long have you been here?” she asks.
He looks her up and down.
“You’re my husband?” she says.
“Yes,” Bob rasps. The air conditioner drones and they stare at each other.
Elise is about to touch his arm when a CNA rushes in, smiles, speaks softly, as to a cornered kitten, and takes her firmly by the arm.
When Elise wakes up from her Vivaquel nap, a boy looms over her—Robert Graham Mood, a sleek young stunner with red hair. She frowns, for Bob’s hair had been black, his lips plump and just a tad crooked. She thinks she may be dead at last, Bob’s golden spirit hovering to welcome her to the next phase.
“Mom,” says the boy.
When her eyes adjust, she notes lines around his eyes, the bulge of a budding gut. Not the father but the son.
“Just give her a few minutes,” says the nurse. “According to the neurotherapists, she’s made enormous strides. Her roaming incident shows some planning, thinking ahead, which indicates enhanced semantic memory.”
“And you think she knows he’s my father?”
“She knows he’s somebody. Found him halfway across the complex. I had no idea they’d even been married.”
“They still are, technically, you know.”
Elise snorts at this, but nobody pays one bit of attention.
“Of course. Very odd, though it happens from time to time. Married people in different wings. We don’t do couples at Eden Village.”
“It really didn’t matter until now,” says the boy, sinking into the chair by the bed. “I didn’t think the therapies would lead to anything, with her so far gone. But still, I figured why not?”
Elise claws at her throat, her tongue as dead as a slab of pickled beef. She knows the boy is her son, but she can’t remember when he was born or how he got to be grown so fast.
“Mom,” says the boy, that familiar tinge of whininess in his voice, and it comes to her: her son home from college for a few days, pacing from window to window, restless as a cooped rooster. He said the house felt smaller than he remembered. Stayed out on the boat all day with the spoiled-rotten Morrison boys. Acted skittish when he came in from the water, pained eyes hiding behind the soft flounce of his bangs. He’d gone vegetarian, looked as skinny as Gandhi, and she fed him fried okra and butterbeans.
As the two of them sat at the kitchen table making conversation, Bob’s silence leaked from the boy’s old bedroom like nuclear radiation from a triple-sealed vault—the kind of poison you can’t smell but that sinks into your cells, making you mutant from the inside out.
“Bye, Mom.” The boy pats her crimped hand. “I’ll be back soon.” And they leave her in the semidarkness, window shades down, unable to tell if it’s night or day.
The therapists have strapped her into the MEG scanner and popped in a retro-TV sense-enhanced module. While they play footsy under the desk, Elise turns her attention to a montage of The Incredible Hulk episodes, breathing in smells of Hamburger Helper and Bounce fabric-softening sheets. She never cooked Hamburger Helper; she never wasted money on fabric softeners. She never sat through a complete episode of The Hulk, but the seething mute giant reminds her of Bob, who watched it religiously after his accident. She remembers peering into his room, standing there in the hallway for just one minute to watch the green monster rage. Then she’d close the door, drift out into the night with her pack of cigarettes.
Now the screen goes dim and Elise hears crickets, smells cigarette smoke and a hint of gas. Pip’s boat had a leak that summer, and everything they did was enveloped in the haze of gasoline. What did they do? Zigzagged over the lake. Dropped the anchor and sat rocking in the waves, drinking wine coolers and watching for herons. Then they’d drift up to this island he knew. The first time Pip took her to his secret island—the one with the feral goats and rotting shed—she drank until her head thrummed. Bob had not said one word for sixty-two days. Each night before bed she’d stick her head into the toxic glow of his room to say good night, and he’d grunt. She kept track of the days. Ticked them off with a pencil on a yellow legal pad.
He sat there glued to the TV, waiting for news on the hostages, wondering if Afghanistan had turned Communist yet, trying to figure out who shot J.R. She even caught him watching soaps in the middle of the day—like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives—foolishness he used to laugh at. Now he sat grimly as Marlena mourned the death of her premature son and her marriage to a two-timing lawyer fell apart. The dismal music, the tedious melodrama, and the flimsy opulent interiors sank Elise into a malaise. And she’d leave Bob in the eternal twilight of the TV.
Out in the humming afternoon heat, Elise had started talking to herself. Goddamn grass, she’d hiss. Bastard ants. One day, in the itchy okra patch, where unpicked pods had swollen into eight-inch monsters, where fire ants marched up and down the sticky stalks, crawling onto her hands and stinging her in the tender places between her fingers, Elise ripped off her sun hat and shrieked. Then she stormed inside and changed into her swimsuit. Without looking in on Bob, she grabbed her smokes and jogged out to the cove, walked waist-deep into the water while taking deep drags. Fuck, she hissed—a trashy cuss she never indulged in. And then she felt drained of wrath.
She tossed her cigarette butt and swam out to the floating dock, where the water was cooler. Pip Stukes came knifing through the waves, skinny again, his sunglasses two mirrors that hid his sad eyes, and Elise crawled up into his glittery boat. She swigged wine coolers like they were Cokes and laughed a high, dry laugh that was half cough. She lost track of he
rself: let another man kiss her on an island where shadowy goats watched from the woods. She stayed out past dusk and got a sunburn, a bright red affliction that she didn’t feel until the next day.
When she came in that night, Bob didn’t ask where she’d been. Didn’t say one word. Just kept clearing his throat over and over, as though he had something stuck in it—a bit of gristle in his windpipe, a dry spot on his glottis, acid gushing up from his bad stomach. He cleared his throat when she served him supper (one hour later than usual). Cleared his throat when she changed his sheets and punched his pillow with her small fist. Cleared his throat when she quietly shut his door, and kept on clearing his throat as she brushed her teeth and crawled into the bed they’d shared for twenty years.
Elise’s skin blistered and peeled. For several nights she lay in bed rolling it into little balls that she’d flick into the darkness. And then, one week later, her skin tender, the pale pink of a seashell’s interior, she went off with Pip Stukes again.
“I figured out how they catch us,” whispers Pip.
Elise widens her eyes. As they take a little turn around the birdbath, she scans the crowd for wheelchairs. They sit down on a concrete bench.
“Feel that bump on your arm?” Pip slides the tip of his index finger over her forearm, stops when he reaches that hard little pimple that won’t go away. Maybe it’s a wart. Maybe it’s a mole. Elise doesn’t know what it is, but she blushes when he touches the spot.
“Microchip,” he says. “My son put one in his dog’s ear. A good idea. Except we’re not dogs.”
Pip laughs, the old, dark laugh that lingers in the air. Elise can’t remember Pip’s children. And what about his wife? He must have had one. But now she’s unsettled by his eyes, the clear one at least, which drills her with a secret force while the other stares at nothing.
Something about his laugh and fading smile, something about the slant of light and the wash of distant traffic remind her—of what, she’s not sure, not until the blush spreads from her hairline to her chest, not until she sees Pip walking naked from the lake, sees the scar on his chest, the sad apron of belly skin, relic of his previous life as a fat man. And then she remembers. He did have a wife, a girl named Emmy from Silver. They’d had two boys and divorced. Emmy had kept the house in Manning, and Pip moved out to the lake house, free to whip around on the empty water.
For two months they boated out to the little island almost every afternoon. Got sucked into the oblivion of the dog days: shrieking cicadas and heat like a blanket of wet velvet that made you feel half asleep. It was easy to sip wine coolers until you couldn’t think. Easy to swim naked in water warm as spit. In September they finally went to his lake house, a fancy place with lots of gleaming brass, the TV built into a clever cabinet, a stash of top-notch liquor behind the wet bar. Showing her around, Pip pointed out every last effect, all bought with his grandfather’s money. Something bothered her: the way he slapped her rear like a rake on Dallas, the way he smoked afterward in the air-conditioned bedroom. Hiding his saggy gut under the sheet, he kept checking himself out in the mirror. He ran his fingers through his gelled hair.
As Pip went on about the Corvette he wanted to buy, she thought about Bob, how, in the past, he was always quietly tinkering with something. And then poor Pip started up on Korea, told her about coming back home after starving in that bamboo cage, eating for a solid year in a trance, waking up one day to the shock of three hundred pounds. He’d lost the weight and gotten married. But then he gained it back, got divorced, lost it again—his whole life staked to that tedious fluctuation.
That night when she got home, Bob turned from the television and spoke to her.
“Look at this joker,” he said, pointing at Ronald Reagan, the movie star who was running for president, the one who looked like a handsome lizard.
The next day Bob bathed himself and rolled out onto the screened porch. Watching the lake, they shelled field peas all morning. She knew that Pip would come flying out of the blue in his boat, and when he did, Bob cleared his throat and said nothing.
Pip’s boat appeared every afternoon for the next week. They’d hold their breath and wait for the high whine of his motor to fade.
Bob started doing his leg exercises, made an appointment with the hotshot therapist in Columbia. In two years he could get around the house with a walker. By Reagan’s second term he was ambling with a cane. He took care of the chickens, started dabbling with quail. And every year they sold more land, acre by acre, until all they had was their cottage—mansions towering on every side, the lake a circus of Jet Skis, houseboats so big they blotted out the sun.
Bob and Elise got old on the lake, their son breezing in twice a year to say hello. And they planned to die there, right on the water, even though the place was turning to shit.
Elise fingers the scab on her arm. It’s been a week since she gouged the microchip out with the sharp scissors she nabbed from the Dementia Ward desk. All this time she’s kept the fleck of metal in her locket and nobody’s said one word. The nurses know better than to touch her locket, a thirtieth-anniversary gift from Bob—not a heart, like you’d expect, just a circle of gold that opens via a hinge, a clip of Bob’s gray hair stuffed inside as a sweet joke. To thirty more years of glorious monotony, Bob had said, and they’d laughed, opened another jar of mulberry wine.
A tech nurse escorts Elise out to the pear orchard. Just as soon as she’s released into the flock of seniors, Pip Stukes comes swaggering across the grass.
“Hey, good lookin’, what you got cookin?”
Elise takes his arm as usual and they promenade across stepping-stones, over to their favorite bench. Pip talks about his son, who dropped by this morning with Pip’s grandbaby, now a grown girl. He talks about the artificial bacon he had for breakfast and the blue jay that perched on his windowsill. Then he goes quiet and just stares at her, filling the space between them with sighs. It’s warm for November. The mums have dried up and the pear trees drop their last red leaves. When Pip leans in to kiss her, Elise embraces him, keeping her lips off limits while hugging him close enough to slip the microchip into his shirt pocket.
She sits back and smiles. It feels good to be invisible.
“You remember that island?” says Pip.
Elise nods, touches his cheek, stands up on her robot legs, and then walks off into the canna lilies. Behind the dead flowers are two big dumpsters and, if she’s calculated correctly, a door leading into the Dogwood Library.
When Bob wakes up, she’s standing there in a shaft of late-morning light, a small-boned woman wearing strap-on plastic Power Units like something from the Sci-Fi Channel, her gray hair cropped into an elfin cap.
“Elise,” he rasps.
“Bob,” she says.
His thick lids slide down over watery eyes.
“Bob?” she says. He shifts in his chair but won’t wake up.
She checks his pulse, grabs his blanket from the bed, and tucks it around him. Makes sure he’s got on proper socks under his corduroy slippers. And then she rolls him toward the door.
Though Elise has spent many an afternoon wrinkling her nose at the smell of chickens, she isn’t prepared for the endless stream of barracks southwest on Highway 301: three giant buildings as long as trains and leaking a stench so shocking she can’t believe it doesn’t jolt Bob from his nap. Mouth-breathing, she hustles to get past the nastiness, fingering the button that operates his chair, kicking it into high gear, the one the nurses use when they’re in a tizzy.
She’s been walking for an hour, on a strip of highway shoulder that comes and goes, smooth sailing for a mile and then she’ll hit a patch of bumpy asphalt and veer onto the road. A number of motorists have passed—mostly big trucks, pickups, the occasional SUV—and she worries that some upstanding citizen has already called Eden Village. She expects a cop car to roll up any minute. Expects to see the officer put on his gentle smile, the one he uses with feeble-minded people and lunatics, geezers and l
ittle children. She would prefer a back road, some decent air and greenery, but she knows she wouldn’t remember the way.
If she recalls correctly, 301 is almost a straight shot to the water. Though her legs don’t hurt, her shoulders do, an ache that dips into her bones. Her fingers cramp as they grip the handles of Bob’s chair. And she’s too thirsty to spit. She imagines sweating glasses of sweet tea, cold Coca-Cola in little bottles, lemonade with hunks of fruit floating in the pitcher. She remembers the time she took Bob to meet her grandmother. They drank from a pump on the old wraparound porch, drawing cool spring water up from the earth. She recalls sipping from the garden hose and tasting rubber. Remembers the special flavor of Bob’s musty canteen, the one they always took camping. She and Bob once hiked up Looking Glass Rock, crouched under a waterfall with their mouths open, taking giant gulps, the whole mountain wet with dew. Hosts of tiny frogs had clung to the stone, suckers on their toes.
When they get to the lake Elise will roll Bob to the end of their old pier. It’ll be dusk by then, she thinks, catfish crowding in the shallows. She wants him to see water on every side when he wakes up, vast and black, with the sky in pink turmoil, as though it’s just the two of them, out there floating in a little boat.
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 9