The ducks honked, butted his shins, begged noisily for grub. There were no babies. His sister’s animals only interested him when he was missing his father, because Patricia, who had a watercolor memory of the man Edward had been too young to know, said it was Walter who’d assembled the petting zoo. He’d taught her to care for the animals and love them and how caring and loving were not the same. She told Edward this one night they were still young enough to be friends. He crept into her room and sat on the edge of the bed and shook her big knuckly feet until she woke and asked her what their dad had been like. In her half sleep she said, “He sang to me and got the animals, other stuff like that.”
“You’re so lucky. Was he great?”
“I think he was. It’s her fault. I don’t remember.”
“Why did he go?”
“I dunno.”
“But you were there. She did it?”
“I heard her say ‘fucking fucks.’”
“No! Mother?”
“Shhh! Yes.” He crawled to the top of the bed and lay his head below her mouth, to hear better. “I was behind the couch. She thought I was outside playing with Nanny. She was at the rolltop. Her face was practically stuck in the cubbies. She was writing something. Then she went to her bedroom for like a week. After that she was in the city, but we stayed here. I missed a month of school. When she got back, she said it would just be us.”
“We missed school? We’ve never missed school!”
“No, I did. You were too little. We went to Esme’s house.”
“Esme’s house? Why did we go there?”
“Mother took me to school in the morning instead of Dad. Esme was with me in the back. But I didn’t stay at school. Mother said something to the teacher and we got back in the car, but Mother got into another car and Esme drove our car home. Mother called us the next day, but then she had to go, because ‘here come the suits.’ I didn’t get it, but they were keeping us out of the news. Big gossip divorce. And I’m not sure, but I think right before he left, Dad switched all my ducks. I know that’s crazy. But we were in the city, and when we came back, they weren’t the same ones. They looked the same, but Maudie, my favorite, didn’t act like Maudie. She snubbed me every time I tried to feed her. And Princess Cassiopeia was tiny and spotty and had been in love with Peter Pan, but then she wasn’t any of those things anymore. For a long time I thought he took the old ducks with him to remember me. Shut up, I was little.”
Edward lay down in the grass. The ducks had given up on a feeding and waddled idly; one bent to groom Edward’s hair but soon realized her mistake and rushed away. He heard Esme call him to dessert several times. Finally she tromped out into the garden, smoothing her apron. Though his eyes were closed, he could hear her shape in her step: solid as a doorstop, one leg dragging a little, the scarred knee hidden under her gray skirt.
“Pequeño Edward, your mother wants to know why you are not back at the table. It’s table time.” Her hair, back tight, stretched her brow above her pocketed eyes.
“You tell her,” he said without opening his eyes, “she has to come get me. Not you. You tell her I ate breakfast and I ate lunch and I ate dinner and Javier lets me buy candy on the drive home because I’ll tell lies about him if he doesn’t, so he lets me. Look! I broke my tooth on a Gobstopper last week and nobody noticed. I am full. You tell her.”
Esme shook her head. “You want to get me in trouble too? I made macaroni special for you and your sister, as extra, a secret, for later in the kitchen. Come.”
“I will not.”
“Okay, we’ll stay one minute and you can answer a grammar question for me like you do.”
He hated her for comforting him. It would never be enough.
She brought out the small notebook she carried in her pocket and flipped to a page. “You are very helpful. When somebody says, ‘This will have been’ in English, what time do they mean?”
He didn’t know the answer. He suspected, even worse, that she did. He sat up, and in an ugly knockoff of her accent he said, “I think that is an e-specially advanced question, Esme. More e-special than your macaroni. I think you should be focusing on the basics. You think you’re doing me a favor? You’re always in my room. You’re paid to be here. I can’t stand anybody, and that includes you.”
He loved her as much as circumstance allowed; she had been kinder to him than anyone else.
“Edward, I’ve known you since you are small. Small enough, I forgive you for being a pendejo.” She turned back to the house.
(Dear nobody, he wrote that night, I spit on purpose and it went on her leg!)
“Shelia said I am an asshole. But I am not an asshole,” he cried after her, and trembled at using the word out loud. But it didn’t count to use it on some old no-person. “I am not the asshole, I am the monster!” he shouted, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, his mother was squinting over him in the dark.
“Edward, what do you think you are up to?”
“I am thinking where my father is.”
“You are wondering where your father is, or you are thinking, Where is Father? Clarity is half the battle. To the point, you treated Esme wickedly. I could see it in her step.”
“Stupid.” He hid his face from her. “George is an asshole name like Edward is an asshole name, but I like it better. Don’t you, Cecilia? I am George!” The sting of her hand spread across his cheek, but he didn’t flinch.
“Don’t be smart,” she said, trying to yank him up by the wrists. When this did not work—if he knew how to play anything, it was dead—she dropped them. Through his slit eye he watched her put her face in her hands and laugh.
“Who cares, anyway,” he said.
“Look where I am. I am in this pen with you. At dinnertime. You know how this muck depresses me. We’ll call you George for a month and see if we like it. But only if you come in, because Patricia will not eat without you. Will you come have dessert?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever you did to Esme, you will apologize.”
Now, so many years later, he hardly thinks of this time. When he’s asked why he goes by his middle name, he tells the story that he came upon Esme sitting under a tree, sad about some news from home. She misses her home still, after all the years. He comforts her as only he can. He gets her to laugh, and laughing, she calls him George Edward instead of Edward George. It surprises them both and they laugh some more. Once they compose themselves, they go back inside and everyone sits down to cake and the new name sticks. George did apologize to Esme, but her face was closed to him ever after. That year, CeCe allowed him to give up the piano.
He tells Iris every old detail that springs to mind, maybe because he hasn’t told her about the bank. She nods and makes noises and smiles at his youthful despair and frowns when he describes how his mother treated him and Patricia, and when he is through, she murmurs, half-asleep, “You freaks. I have my stories, but not like that,” and pulls him close.
12
Her twenty-seventh morning at the clinic, CeCe and Nurse Jean are still fighting about breakfast.
“Please try,” Jean says, leaning closer. “Too many full trays go back and they recommend appetite stimulants. I’ve never had a patient enjoy those. Make your heart knock around and your hands sweat. And what a thirst! Much worse than a few bites of muffin and egg. Muffin? Here.”
Their morning routine. The nurse takes her vitals, doses out the pills, checks the cleanliness of CeCe’s station, pulls her limbs various directions, tells her all the nice things she can do outdoors as long as the weather holds. The possibilities indoors too. This evening, some soul-annihilating jamboree in honor of Bastille Day. “Songs in French,” the nurse explains. “I didn’t know what Bastille Day was. Happy Bastille Day!”
CeCe takes the spoon from the nurse’s outstretched hand and helps herself to three bites of the gray scramble. The nurse squeezes CeCe’s feet through the light blanket. It is odd and unpleasant to be made so aware of one’s
feet while eating.
“This should be a fork,” she says, and sets the spoon down. She’d awoken inside the well of a wild thrash, soaked in sweat. The nurse prattles away, ticking along the wide, dusty road of the daily schedule: what time the doctor will stop in, when the physical therapist arrives, when the afternoon nurse takes over the hall, what’s good for television. She recommends a reality show about a rodeo, ranch hands competing for prizes under the high sky. Birdpoison, brainrot. Limited, doltish girl. CeCe nods and smiles.
George called and apologized the day after he left, though he made no comprehensible excuse. She was brave, complained only a little, asked him to bring a few items up, forgave him. He complimented her adaptability and said he had a phone conference coming on the other line. He’d call right back. They’ve spoken four times since. Each time, he’s quicker to sign off. He says he’s coming to visit, but doesn’t say when. His voice, an armor of impatient cheer. This week, he hasn’t returned any of her calls. Hardly anyone’s called. Nan, last week, but CeCe forbade her to come. “I’ll be home sooner than you could get here,” she said to Nan. She’s spoken with Esme to ask about the house. And about George, if he seems off—Esme, the only person who knows enough to understand this question. Esme said George seemed fine. Pat called once and complained about morning sickness and brain fog, delayed a visit. CeCe answered she didn’t remember being impaired by pregnancy in the slightest. Pat sends flowers every week, but they haven’t spoken again. Just enough and not enough. Just like Pat. Good Annie Mason’s kept her up on the fund’s doings every Friday as planned, but CeCe has not allowed those conversations to stray beyond business. She will never let the invalid and the philanthropist coexist. The business of charity becoming, so suddenly, her only remote gratification. Whole days have gone by when she hasn’t spoken to a soul beyond the doctors and this tobacco-smelling nurse. Today’s the day. I’ll call George and demand he come. Right away, and that he bring proper drapes.
The nurse lays out a quilted, blue kimono, pulls the curtain, admonishes her to eat a few more bites from the breakfast tray, and is gone. Twenty-seven days. Though, what is the date? Where’s the newspaper, did they take it away before she read it? Look how again the nurse hasn’t properly pulled the curtains. What will she do until lunch, now that she’s swallowed the requisite boli of egg and pill, and the paper’s missing?
She watches the landscaper through the gap between the curtains. Her hands knit and unknit independent of her will. She can’t track what sets them off. She suspects it’s her mood. Once at dinner, to Iris, George had actually said, “Don’t excite Mother.” CeCe had been chewing and bit her tongue instead of her food and put her hands in front of her face to hide the blood inside her mouth. How bitter the pith of aging is, and yet, when the tremors cease and when the pain subsides, how peaceful and vigorous she feels for a time. The pain’s break like that other breaking, the marshaled adrenaline. In the hours after an episode she feels happy—lithe as a ten-ton seal, mean as a girl of twenty.
The storm fades into a dull zing up and down her arms. It’s almost over. Her hands bird up in front of her. One brushes the tray. She adds a breath of her own strength to the alien motion and knocks the tray to the floor. The twitch and she can work together, now and again. Her hands drop and root through the sun-cut blankets. How satisfying! The orange tray is upside down. The egg glops across the floor. She considers the emergency buzzer, a red aureole set in a cube of gray plastic at the end of a cord placed on her bedside table. Is such a mess an emergency? What would she like for breakfast instead? Should she press the button? When she was a child, her father would allow her a sip of his coffee across the linen table of a hotel dining room. His face, severe and regular as a clock’s. She misses him, she wishes she’d known him, she misses knowing what time it is. He was so tall, she only remembers him from below, the underside of his bearded chin like a rusty trowel, clearer in her memory than the shape of his nose. My lone eaglet, he called her once, as they sat facing each other on a rattling train. Her mother, dead by the time CeCe was old enough to look for her. Perhaps her father has come back into her mind so much of late because he too was ill, all the time he carted her around the continent. As darkness stitched the windowpane, he would button his coat and leave her with one of a thousand foreign hotel maids to point to what she wanted. He told her to think of this as a game of charades. Whether the woman was French or Dutch or German, Cecilia became accustomed to taking care of herself by way of pantomime: to hold up her brush and cross her fingers meant plait my hair, to fold down the air above the unfamiliar pattern of the bedclothes meant for the maid to carry out this motion in the real. Weekends, her father was hers. She’d gather the wickets from the lawn, fertile and clipped, and behind her was a white umbrella, his white poplin pant leg. The skin of his large hand when it held hers was red and blistered and smelled oddly sweet. He hid his sickness well until the end. He comes back to her now with such clarity that the intervening years—her marriages, her children, her dabbling in—oh, what?—are like the drag of a slippered foot in someone else’s room far down the well-lit hall.
Now only her pointer finger wiggles. Where it began a year ago. She’d been sitting alone at her writing desk, writing to the mayor about the noisy drift off the water, those noisy little boys from the sailing camp sailing into her cove. She was writing as she did almost every day, but soon her index finger felt thick around the pen, and her writing, the clerically dull phrase noise pollution, fell onto the page in a haphazard scuttle, as a spider drops off a table. She put down the pen and found the finger gesturing, an insistent come-here curl. She watched with incredulous detachment—the hand so far from her eye, independent of her will. The gesture didn’t belong to her. It didn’t immediately upset her. It reminded her of the stories Toto had read to her and she had read to George and Patricia: the cottage in the woods, the witch’s coax to enter. Dear Toto, her nurse. Now, again she has a nurse.
She tries best to challenge fear with boredom. How much the twitching pain forces her to think about her body, she has long decided, is not a worthy use of time. How boring, she says, whenever she feels afraid. Her skin is ashen and dreary, and yet how much more sensitive it has become, the sheets as hard and variegated as braille. Lately, she can feel her lower lid rough against her eye. Tongue to roof of mouth, the strange metal of the blood pumping through the tongue. Iron, she guesses. And food! The passage of food down the throat. At least her speech hasn’t slowed or become halting. Not yet.
Her body stills itself. She presses the buzzer. Why not? The phone rings. She explains about the tray. Soon a man knocks and sets to silently mopping the mess off the floor. He draws the curtains open before he leaves. She doesn’t protest. She won’t speak to a strange man while wearing pajamas. Next, a woman in candy stripes drops lunch beside her. Next again, the sun is lower in the sky, but the grass still shines. The time passes over her.
Her attending doctor, a young man with sharp cheekbones and shaggy hair, enters without knocking. This indecency jars her limbs, but not, thankfully, into an electrical storm. He’s only surprised her. Which is more vexing, the arrogance of doctors or the ineptitude of nurses? He pats her hand and says, in a voice meant for Shakespeare’s, or Eakins’s, theater:
“How goes it? I hear we’ve had a rough day. Have we had a rough day? You’re familiar with how we take the holistic view here. The emotional life—” He paces and poses as he speaks. He stops with abrupt drama and lowers his voice. He is young. “In anger, there is sadness. We have someone on staff you can talk to.”
For a moment she feels she might—but then he smiles lavishly, in the way young men think they are doing old women a favor by flirting with them. He’s enjoying himself. She doesn’t care he’s noticed her untouched lunch, a sandwich cut from cardboard.
“You are misquoting,” she says, “a facile axiom about death, about a person’s response to the news they are terminal. It’s denial, anger, depression, bargaining,
and then I don’t remember. Besides, I am getting better.”
“So, you’re feeling better?” He picks up her chart, holding it between them. “A good response, Mrs. Somner. So far so good. Any new feelings you want to tell me about? More tremor, less? Change in strength, motor function, pain—more, less, different? Side effects? Headache? Nausea? Registering any side effects?”
“None. You are a resident?”
“And your energy?”
“Are you—” She sits up and takes the sandwich in her hands and lifts it as if she might take a bite. “Are you learning on me?”
She’s had her effect. She sees him trying to hold his face, his authority, steady.
“Dr. Adams and I are working in tandem. You can rest assured.”
“Schoolboy, dearest, I’ve been resting here insured all week long.” She’s meant to shame him with wit, but he doesn’t understand. Her embarrassment at this—even she could hear how her sentence wobbled to a halt—cretinous man! “Is it true that doctors no longer pay attention to the flesh-and-blood patient? That all your generation of medical people cares about is the bottom line? Now, Dr. Adams, would he be someone more senior? Would he perhaps provide me better treatment?”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. But, what if you run along and find him anyway? The answer to all your questions is no. All’s the same. If you are done with me for today, let’s see if you and he can’t make a switch.”
“We don’t really do consultations within—”
“What a good suggestion, dear. I would like to consult Dr. Adams. Don’t forget to tell him my name. You need a reason that doesn’t put you at fault. I know! Tell him I’m not eating.” She smiles and takes a bite from the sandwich, chews it thoughtfully, and drops the remainder in the plastic trash pail beside the bed. She turns her head away from him to signal his dismissal. In the mirror of the open closet door she sees her scowling, patchy face. She thought she’d been smiling. In the mirror, the resident takes three steps backward and turns out the door.
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 11