“I WAS a drummer,” Nolan said. “That meant you had to drink like crazy but not lose the beat. For me it was one or the other, so I went back to school.” He was talking to her father, who had perked up as he always did when Nolan was around. They had driven down from Seattle to give him some exercises for his arthritis. He liked talking to Nolan, sitting at the breakfast table with Tory on his lap. “I had a physiology professor tell me why not forget the whole thing, join the navy,” Nolan said.
“What? What?” her father said in an old man’s loud voice that made Tory turn to look up at his face. “You could have taught him something.”
“Hope I won’t have to,” Nolan said.
SHE had a different handwriting. Strong smells gave her a headache. She no longer had any blue clothes. She prayed. Not to God. But when she was waiting for her son at the door of the preschool she prayed steadily. Not because she was anxious. “Don’t worry,” the aides were always saying. She was not worried, she was praying him back to her. While the other mothers talked by their cars, when the high syllables of the last song rang out behind the shut door, the prayer intensified until it was answered.
SHE and Tory, whose shots were behind him, were watching the clinic fish steer in and out of a pearly castle when suddenly the woman who had come out of one of the doors behind the receptionist turned into Teresa. She was heavy, with blonde hair instead of brown, and a stethoscope around her neck. She looked up. “Oh my God,” she said, steadying herself with a hand on the receptionist’s shoulder. “Mary Ann!” She ran out into the waiting room and hugged Mary Ann as if she had been searching everywhere for her.
“And this, this beautiful child is yours? Your little boy?” said Teresa, squatting down in front of Tory with her hands out in a way that said to Mary Ann that she might clutch him.
“He’s shy,” Mary Ann said.
“I’m not shy,” he said.
“Oh my God. Mary Ann! Come into the back, come into my office so we can talk. I don’t have a patient right now. Are you waiting—who are you waiting to see?”
“Dr. Cooley. We saw her. We’re just waiting for a prescription.”
“I’ll tell her I’ve stolen you. Oh, this is unbelievable. I’m just here on a locum, I don’t even work here. Oh my God. How many years is it? And how old are you, little buddy? I bet you’re . . . five.”
“I’m five,” he said.
Mary Ann couldn’t pin down when Teresa must have graduated and gone away, so she said, “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“Nine years? Ten? Is he your only one?”
As if there could be another. As if this love could be repeated. Mary Ann nodded.
“I have three,” said Teresa as if to apologize. “I married Alex.”
“Alex . . .”
“You remember Alex.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do, I think.”
“We went to Chicago for our residencies and then he did a fellowship year,” said Teresa, leading the way into an examining room, “and then we lived in Chicago again so I sort of don’t know what happened to anybody. Sit right up on that stool, sweetie.” Tory had already climbed up and sat swinging his legs. “Mary Ann, Mary Ann. So. How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“So-o . . . tell me.”
“Tell you?”
“All about you.”
“Oh, OK. Well, remember Nolan?”
“Of course I remember Nolan.”
“We got married.”
“You got married.” Teresa did the thing with her hands again that made Mary Ann think she might be going to grab her. “And had this beautiful child.”
“I didn’t get pregnant for a long time, but then I did.”
“Yes, you did. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I’m seeing you. And your son!”
“We live here,” Mary Ann explained, to settle her down. “Nolan’s at the same place. The hospital.”
“Where’s my Spiderman?” Tory whispered to her.
“Everybody just scattered!” Teresa went on. “We just came back and I’ve hardly seen anybody from the old days. Well anyhow, I’m a pediatrician. Can you believe it? Who would have thought? Did you think I’d be an old married lady in Peds? Remember when I was going to put an ad in The Stranger?”
“Here he is,” said Mary Ann, handing Tory Spiderman from her purse.
“That’s all I thought about in those days. I know I went out a lot but I didn’t have the boyfriends, like you did.” Teresa smacked herself on the forehead. “Did I really say that?”
“What, about boyfriends? I guess so, I guess I did. My mom kept pictures of me with some of them.”
“Your mom! How is she?”
“She died.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry to hear that. Was she ill?”
“She just . . . got worse and worse.” A vague shame came over Mary Ann. She didn’t know what her mother had actually died of. Her heart bent in on itself: her mother had never seen Tory.
“What a shame,” said Teresa. “Things were hard for her. Did she live to know about Dennis?”
“About Dennis?”
“That he died?”
“Dennis? He died?”
“Oh dear. He did. He died quite a while ago.”
“Did he get out? What happened to him?” She saw Dennis walking out the door of the institution and being hit by a bus.
“Oh dear,” Teresa said again.
“It’s all right,” Mary Ann assured her.
“Well, I’ll be in trouble with somebody for this. He jumped off a roof.” Teresa said this in a whisper. She made a steeple of her hands and turned to Tory. “But, this wonderful boy! And—Nolan! Why don’t you run in here after your appointment so we can really catch up.”
“We already had our appointment. Why did he?”
“Good lord.” Teresa sat down. “What do you know about Dennis?”
“I don’t know, I guess nothing.”
“He was in and out of those places for years. I have a little patient like that right now that I’m referring to the Vose Center.” Teresa took some glasses out of her lab coat pocket and put them on to look at Mary Ann. “You know about the center? For when the whole thing starts in childhood. No? I’ve had to be in touch with them a couple of times. The Vose family.” For the name she put on a little accent. “A big deal. Oh, Mary Ann.” Teresa got up and threw her arms around Mary Ann and hugged her as if she would never see her again. “Oh, I hope I haven’t made things harder.”
“Things aren’t hard,” Mary Ann said when she got loose.
All this she explained to Nolan on the phone, after she took Tory to school. She was trying to get used to the all-day kindergarten. She told Nolan what had happened to Dennis Vose. There was a silence and then Nolan said, “I have to say that I knew that.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t. I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you think that was the same thing as a lie?”
“No,” she said. He tried to tell the truth but he couldn’t always do it. You couldn’t if somebody asked you at work, for instance, if their scars made them ugly.
A SHORT fat woman in an orange smock answered the door, eating a candy bar out of the wrapper.
“Carolyn,” a voice called from deep inside. “Will you see if that’s our visitor? Use the viewer.” But the woman had already said “Come in.”
Mary Ann stood still. There, past the French doors opening onto a long room with urns of flowers on stands, was the marble table. The iceberg. With the rest of what was in the room in pink and white and gold, it became a piece of whatever that kind of furniture was called.
Not from Goodwill. From this house.
“AM I speaking to Mary Ann Kemp? This is Mrs. Vose.” This voice, a flat voice with pauses and little slurps as if the person were eating, was asking her to visit the Voses in their home. Where did they live? In The Dales. North of the city on the Sound.
They wanted her to c
ome that same day. “I can’t get out there unless there’s a bus,” Mary Ann said to the voice. “I just drive around here. Just in the area.”
“We’ll send a car,” said Mrs. Vose.
She called Nolan again and he said she should go if she wanted to. He had heard of The Dales. He didn’t think she needed to have him with her. He would pick Tory up from kindergarten and take him back to work with him, where he could have a good time on the rings in the gym.
“But I always pick him up,” Mary Ann said. “I’m always there.”
“Just today,” Nolan said. “Let these people say they’re sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“Sorry they didn’t tell you. Sorry they didn’t give you a heads-up back then that their son was from someplace else all right but it sure wasn’t Canada.”
So she called back. The car Mrs. Vose sent was a pickup truck, driven by an old man. He said he was coming off his shift at the gatehouse. After he said he did some driving for the Voses because they didn’t get out in a car much since the stroke, he was content to drive without having a conversation with her. By way of the freeway, The Dales wasn’t that far after all. The man smoked with the window open, and at the end of one cigarette he slowed at a gatehouse and saluted the face in it, and then after some hills and circling around they turned into a driveway.
“Thank you very much,” Mary Ann said, but she couldn’t remember his name.
He didn’t get out of the truck. “I live down the road,” he said, gesturing at some woods in the distance. “Four o’clock, I’ll be back.” She wondered if she should have had money to give him.
“This is Carolyn, our daughter-in-law. Dennis’s wife. Come with us, Carolyn,” Mrs. Vose said. She was old and walked with an aluminum cane. She lifted it and for a minute Mary Ann thought she was going to give Carolyn’s legs a tap with it to get her going. Carolyn had finished her candy bar and Mrs. Vose took the wrapper from her and put it in the pocket of her dress.
Mary Ann got the smell of a cat. Not strong, but there. She liked cats and looked around for one. She and Carolyn sat on the couch, the Voses in wing chairs covered in pale green stripes and roses. Mr. Vose was a heavy man who wheezed when he moved, sucking in the flushed rounds of his cheeks. Another old woman came very slowly and sideways into the room. She set down a big tray of tea things on the iceberg, and they didn’t introduce her so Mary Ann saw that she was the maid.
The mother, who had a small, childish, lined face, a perfectly shaped face Mary Ann had seen before, poured unsteadily from the big teapot, and right away she said, while she was stirring, “We’re told Dennis was happy when he was with you.”
For just a minute her heart had gone out to Mrs. Vose because she had trouble with her speech and had to keep wiping her mouth with a handkerchief. When she said this about happiness the father glanced at Carolyn.
Mary Ann said, “I don’t know.” You didn’t have happiness or unhappiness as a memory. You had specific things like your face in the steam and suddenly behind you in the mirror another face. A certain kind of music being on all the time. “I don’t know,” she said again. She had something she was going to say, though. “In your twenties”—here she was quoting her mother—“you’re having fun, you aren’t ready, you aren’t ready for . . .” For what?
“Dennis was not in his twenties. He was thirty-five years old at the time,” his mother said.
“Thirty-five,” Mary Ann said. A year older than she was now, the boy crying in front of the TV because Kurt Cobain was dead.
“This is a picture of his wedding,” Mrs. Vose said, taking a photograph out of her pocket along with the candy wrapper, which she shook off her fingers onto the rug. “He married Carolyn while they were there.” Carolyn did not seem to have to be included in the talk. In the picture a fattish couple stood in front of a cake, smiling—Mary Ann would have said idiotically, but she knew, now, never to use such a word.
“He always wanted marriage and a family,” his mother said. “From an early age. That was all he wanted in life.”
“Well, Dorothy, we knew that was unlikely,” said the father.
In Mrs. Vose’s way of speaking, halting but irritable, Mary Ann began to feel some threat, as if some crude or ugly word might come up the middle of what she was saying. Carolyn seemed to be dozing rather than listening, except occasionally her head would snap up and she would look at the father with a dog’s mild anxiety.
Coming up the freeway beside the man in the truck, Mary Ann had decided to tell the Voses that she had loved their son. Now she saw that the word love could not be trusted on all occasions. And in reality, she loved only her own son. Oh, she loved Nolan, or liked him more than anyone else. But her son . . . her little boy: for him, for him, something had been turned on and even after it filled her it never stopped, there was always room for more of it. So she was not after all going to use the word about anybody else.
“Actually, the center has been around since the twenties,” Mr. Vose said. His bleary, helpless gaze seemed not to match his words. He seemed to want her to know something. Was it that they were sorry? “Later we came in with some backing in Dennis’s memory and they renamed it.”
“That was where Dennis lived?”
“From time to time, in the early years, yes, he did stay there.”
“He developed schizophrenia,” said the mother, training her eyes, wide in the rings of old skin, on Mary Ann.
The father wheezed even attempting something as simple as taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “Usually that type of thing won’t show up until the teens. But in his case it was a little earlier.”
“He would never have hurt anybody. Something would have to provoke him,” said Mrs. Vose, taking her cane and stamping it twice into the rug, which sent up dust. “Something.”
“Dorothy,” her husband said.
“You’re alive,” Mrs. Vose continued, to Mary Ann.
“Dorothy.”
Another woman, not as old as Mrs. Vose and the maid, came to the door, took a look at Mrs. Vose and another at Carolyn, and went away.
“Somebody just told me,” Mary Ann said. “About Dennis. I didn’t know about that.”
“About what?” said his mother.
“That he ended his life.” Those were the words suggested by Nolan. “Teresa told me. My friend from medical school.”
“Of course I know who told you,” said Mrs. Vose, fussily swatting the air. “She called us to let us know, last week I believe it was.”
“This morning,” said Mr. Vose.
“I haven’t seen her in a long time,” said Mary Ann. “I’m not sure how long but I did see her today when I took my son to the doctor.”
“You have a son.”
“I do. I have a little boy, Tory. He’s five.”
Mrs. Vose was wiping her mouth. “Five,” she said through the handkerchief.
SHE had learned to type with both hands, but she was typing with one finger, to keep an arm around Tory. Sometimes he hit the key for her. “V,” she told him. “O.” He loved the alphabet; he had known the letters since he was three. Not just to say them: he could read. He could use the computer.
There were pages on Dennis Vose, Sr., benefactor of the Vose Center, with his wife Dorothy Suttler Vose.
The Vose Center. The web page had a picture of a campus, and another of a smiling, attractive child. The child stood still among trees; the nurse behind him had on a white uniform. Nurses didn’t wear white uniforms any more, they wore ugly print tops and white pants, or scrub suits. Mary Ann knew hospitals. In the cafeteria of the one where she had lived, she still met Nolan for lunch. She still ran into people in the halls who had known her at different times. When they spoke of those times they did so in certain ways, depending on which time it was they were recalling. She recognized the ways; they didn’t mention the episode but they all knew more about a period in her own life than she did. They cared more. She had her snowflakes.
At a
ny rate she knew people didn’t wear what the nurse in the picture had on. They didn’t wear what Dorothy Vose had had on that afternoon either, a navy blue dress from some dim time, with big, chipped buttons and a pocket where you put a picture of your son’s wedding.
If they had invited her in order to say they were sorry, they had forgotten to do it. By the end of the hour Mrs. Vose had lost track of things, and seemed to think Mary Ann had come to bring them something. Several times she inquired as to how Mary Ann was going to get home. When the deep chimes of the doorbell sounded they all sat up straight in relief, except Carolyn, slumped against the cushions. “Her medication,” Mr. Vose said softly to Mary Ann. He wheezed on the way to the door, where Mrs. Vose said, “Where is your coat?” and Mary Ann said, “I don’t have one, it’s summer,” and Mrs. Vose said, “Oh, at this time of day my mind wanders so.”
Mary Ann got into the truck. The man had the windows down to let the cigarette smoke out so she leaned her head out to call a good-bye. Mrs. Vose was ducking and twisting her shoulders, trying to keep her husband from guiding her back into the house. Because her mind wandered. If you lost your son you would search, you would have promised to, your mind would not rest.
IT was late and they sat in the kitchen listening to music while she told Nolan about the cane and the wedding picture and Carolyn. She told him about the iceberg. “But I doubt if they sit there,” she said. “In that room. I bet they go someplace else in the house. Where the cat is.”
They had the CD player turned low so as not to wake Tory. At the end of a hard day Nolan still put on Nirvana. At work he liked music on and when you were his patient he would play whatever you wanted, as loud or soft as you wanted. When she was in rehab, Mary Ann had not been able to choose. So Nolan said a select few of his people liked to do their PT to Nirvana, which did them good and did him good. Because of the groan. Any song by Nirvana had the groan, he said. The howl. “Things are far gone, but yet a song is being sung about them,” he said. “And not only that, a little bird told me Nirvana is your favorite.”
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