by Sam Tranum
‘It’ll be for a year, tops. Me and Mr R. are going to see the country. The Grand Canyon. The Rocky Mountains. Then we’re making our way through California and up the West Coast.’
His mother faced the sink, crying as she washed the dishes, her shoulders jerking, her voice gargling the words.
‘And that old white man is paying you? This is one crazy idea, Wardell. This whole scheme is coated in crazy. You ever think of that?’
‘Then at least he’s seen Big Sur, Momma. And Monterey. And the sunrise over Sausalito.’
There was a lot more he wanted to tell her but couldn’t. Two years earlier, he’d been diagnosed with the low blood. Pre-leukaemia they called it. Hell, it was supposed to stay like that for years. He only had to make it to Seattle.
‘I’ll try to call every week, Momma,’ knowing it for a lie. She was too poor to afford a computer or a fancy phone. Wardell looked at his mother one last time. Her apron had a lifetime of stains. Her lined face was a road map of heartache. There was a story behind each and every gray hair. And before he lost it, before the whole meal rose up in his throat, Wardell got out of his chair and left.
The trip took two months. They stopped in motel chains from one coast of the country to the other. The days flew by in a blur. They ate homemade rice pudding in twenty different diners and saw the world’s largest ball of twine. Wardell pushed Monroe’s wheelchair up the Continental Divide and wheeled it through the grand Mormon temple in Salt Lake City.
Some days they did nothing. At night, they each lay in their twin beds, the TV always blaring in the background. But the dreams not only persisted for Monroe, they became more detailed and intense. He followed the funeral procession from the cemetery to Carter’s home just as if he were sitting in the limo beside him. He watched Abe Bernstein rinse his hands with a pitcher of water. Each of Goldie’s friends daintily wrapped pastries in paper napkins before dropping them inside their purses.
‘Maybe they’re visions,’ said Wardell. ‘Like the Indians have. Or like that kid in the movie with the sixth sense.’
‘He saw dead people. In this dream, only I’m dead. Everyone else is having a party! A fucking party! Counting my money on the way to the bank!’
It seemed no matter how hard he tried to escape the dreams, they followed him. He looked at Lake Mead and saw a mirror framed in black crêpe. When he gazed at the Montana horizon, all he saw was an endless tablecloth, rows of half-eaten bagels and lipsticked plastic forks. The flotsam and jetsam of life, thought Monroe, washing up on the shore.
San Francisco, they both decided, was their favourite city. They drove to Chinatown every night, sampling the dim sum from one small restaurant to the next. They never ate with the tourists. They’d peer inside storefronts and look for the places crowded with Asian faces, bustling with foreign tongues. They drove down Lombard Street, gassing the engine on the curves. And when they sat underneath the great redwood trees of Muir Woods, all they could think of was God.
‘Do you think he exists?’ asked Wardell.
He had brought them lunch. A dozen white takeout containers sat on a picnic table, the chopsticks still in them. They had feasted on leftover dumplings and eggrolls, gorging themselves on grease, the grease making its way down their chins and onto their shirts. While Monroe sat in his wheelchair, Wardell sprawled on the grass. He looked up at the tallest trees in the world and blew a long slow whistle between his teeth.
‘If he exists, he’s not paying attention most of the time,’ Monroe said. ‘Probably sitting up in heaven with a six-pack in one hand, a remote in the other, looking down during commercials.’
‘And not all the commercials,’ said Wardell. They were finishing each other’s sentences now. ‘Just the ones for women’s products. Some of the others can be mighty entertaining.’
‘Better than the TV shows,’ added Monroe.
They gazed up at the treetops, looking upwards.
‘Finkle said the papers are final. You’re officially adopted. Your mom okay with that?’
Wardell nodded. He hadn’t spoken to his mother since they’d left Miami. He imagined her sitting at the kitchen table, opening the legal notice, her mouth wide.
‘Maybe we should re-evaluate our options.’ Wardell stood up and busied his hands, collecting the leftovers. ‘Look how well you’ve been doing. Life’s been good.’
He dumped the cartons into the bear-proof metal garbage can and folded the tablecloth neatly, following the creases as if it were a flag.
‘I drove us here,’ said Wardell. He wiped a tear before the old man could see it. ‘I can drive us home.’
There was a hitch in the orderly’s voice. A little hiccup of pain. Monroe glanced at Wardell. When a breeze brushed their faces, they both trembled. Then Monroe stared one more time at the sky.
‘We still haven’t tried the Ghirardelli ice cream place,’ said Monroe. ‘I think I may have one unclogged artery left.’
In Seattle, they checked into one of those all-suite motels that throw in a breakfast, a happy hour and a little kitchenette. They bought groceries and magazines. Water and batteries. They even got new haircuts.
‘We need to get ready!’ Monroe bellowed. ‘It’ll be a long siege.’
Bandages and first-aid supplies. Cans and cans of tuna. Jars and jars of peanut butter.
‘It’s our final bunker,’ said Monroe. ‘Our Alamo. We need reinforcements.’
Finkel found them local counsel. There were legal papers, perhaps more videos, a consultation with a prescribing physician. In two months, tops, they would be ready. Monroe’s will would be finalised and Wardell would be rich. Rich enough to buy his mother a house, rich enough to get a college degree. In two months’ time they would be ready. They had a plan.
And then the nosebleeds started. One morning, Wardell had an infected hangnail. That night, there was a red line up his arm.
‘I think I need to go to the hospital.’ He rolled up his shirtsleeves. ‘My blood problem. I think it’s kicked into high gear.’
The old man stared at the arm. Wardell’s hand was so swollen it looked like the skin would burst. Monroe reached over to touch it. All five fingers were hot.
A week later, Monroe had set up a new bunker at the Hutchinson Cancer Center. He appropriated a corner of the visitor’s lounge, where he parked his wheelchair, a grocery bag of snacks, a pile of sweaters. They had stabilised Wardell and were searching the blood-marrow registries for a match. Monroe was frantic. All his life he had wanted a son and now he was slipping away. The doctors saw the old man in the halls and ran the other way. Each time he confronted them, the same conversation played out.
‘My marrow’s not good enough? Take all you want. Carve me open with Ginsu knives! Blast me with a bazooka!’
Whether it was a nurse or a doctor, the same response would follow. Loudly, because they thought the elderly were deaf. Slowly, because they thought the elderly were stupid.
‘First of all, you’re too old. Second, you’re not a relative. Third, you’d have to match. The blood. It has to be a match.’
Monroe would yank his wispy hair in disbelief. Tufts stood straight out. Wasn’t it obvious to everyone that he was the boy’s father? The old man looked at the orderly and saw Goldie’s smile, his father’s hands, his mother’s hopes. They had embarked – where was that writing pad? – on a journey and now life had sent them another detour.
First Wardell had to survive the transplant. The old man had seen plenty of pain in his life but nothing prepared him for the torture the boy endured. Each hour, then each day, then each week slowly passed. Six months later, they had reached their first milestone. Wardell’s immune system was like a newborn’s, the doctors told them. Gradually he would get stronger.
Monroe brought fresh food and laundered his clothes. Together, they went to the doctor’s appointments and savoured each dollop of good news. The old man still had the visions. He saw them while he watched TV. He saw them on the sides of tall concrete bu
ildings. He saw them spinning on the stop of the Space Needle. He saw them in the clouds.
But they were different now. Of course Carter was still whacking his breast. And Goldie’s friends were busy making a great show of their grief. But now, in the front pew, sat the orderly. With a black ribbon pinned to his suit and a skullcap on his head, he whispered Monroe’s name and chanted the ancient prayers. Tears ran down his cheeks. And Monroe knew that, in some small way, he would go on living forever.
3.
Not a Finger More
Shirley Fergenson
Richard dares me to do ‘that banshee yodel’ again. So I do. After I say no when he expects the opposite, after I call him a tyrant, after he pushes me just enough that I fall to the bottom of the basement steps, after I crash-land against the washing machine, I wail like a wounded animal. When he walks away, first making sure I am more frightened than injured – he is a doctor, after all – I stand, pick up the phone and call the police. While I wait, I pull the ring off my swelling finger before it is too late to remove it at all.
*
I had thought about leaving it in the safety deposit box before we moved to Costa Rica: my perfect blue sapphire surrounded by diamonds, a piece of night sky caught in a lasso of stars. But I couldn’t. Richard gave it to me on our fifth anniversary, and I swore I would never take it off. That’s why it was covered in yellow Nicaraguan dust that day I dangled my hand outside the window of our van. Richard, our four children and I were making this trip out of Costa Rica to extend our visas. An old, Costa Rican Peace Corps drop-out had told us that Panama was too risky for tourists, but Nicaragua was safe – war torn, but no longer dangerous. Richard believed him, and I had to believe Richard. Cross the border, stay overnight, and return with a stamp that extended the deadline for another four months, like feeding a meter.
I was reading and translating out loud a sign in Spanish, PELIGRO, ‘danger’, watching the landscape morph from tropical to lunar, from lush coffee plantations hugging impossible cliffs to barren gullies beckoning to be filled – I hoped not with us – as we crossed the demilitarised zone into a country known for its contra rebels. The route was less road than a series of mouth-like craters waiting to rip and swallow the green gringos. Us. Richard gripped the steering wheel like a bronco-busting cowboy. Rugged, dark and laconic, his square chin and broad shoulders pulled me in and held me fast from the first. They still did. I bit my tongue when our van bounced into what could have been an excavation for a small skyscraper. Our children shrieked as if Disney had arranged this little treat for them. When the front tires found purchase on the other side, the van tilted crazily before righting itself again. Richard settled his nothing-to-worry-about grin on me. I swallowed the salty pocket of blood that had gathered in my cheek.
‘Daddy, do that again.’
I turned to look at our youngest daughter, Laurie. Her chubby, pink face smeared with peanut butter, the only food she, Daniel, Chloe Kate and Julie would eat when we were travelling, if McDonalds weren’t an option. I pulled a few sheets off our precious roll of toilet paper – we’d been told not to expect anything more absorbent than newspaper, if we were even that lucky – and swiped at Laurie’s face while she bounced in and out of my reach.
Peanut butter, not rice and beans. How could I pack enough Skippy – or Charmin – for a year? That was my first innocent question that day, a few months after Richard had sold his orthopaedic medicine practice for so much money it felt like a super-jackpot lottery win. He had had a rough night and awakened agitated, excited.
‘I had this amazing dream,’ he said. ‘We were drinking papaya con leche in Costa Rica on this porch with chickens and monkeys, all of us. But it wasn’t a vacation. We were home.’
I wanted to say, ‘Sounds more like an hallucination.’ I did say, ‘Maybe that was your subconscious telling you to find another job before we all end up like that crazy family in Mosquito Coast, blowing up an ice factory in some tropical rainforest.’ I thought I got my refusal across with just the right amount of humour to pass. Richard didn’t think I was funny.
Months passed. The vision moved from a fantastical dreamscape to a real reservation to have our van shipped on an empty banana boat from Wilmington, Delaware to Limon, Costa Rica. Daniel, our ten-year-old, threatened never to ride in the van again if there were even a hint of Chiquita left behind. When Richard asked the captain if he could accommodate our family along with the van – we would apprentice ourselves to the crew – the captain politely demurred, something about not having insurance for children. Daniel stopped gagging. I stopped laughing. Plane reservations were made. I helped the kids pack twenty duffel bags –half of them stuffed with books – and told my friends how excited and lucky I was to have this great opportunity, changing the subject when they asked me how I really felt. It was only for a year. Besides, Costa Rica was famous for butterflies and orchids, no military and a good school system. Floridians event flew to San Jose for cheap elective surgery. How bad could it be?
We settled in Nicoya, Costa Rica’s answer to the Wild West. I sent back letters filled with stories about scorpions in the bedroom, iguanas in the toilet and chickens in the kitchen. I said how cold showers could be really refreshing. I thought I was pretty funny and let Richard read my letters. He thought I was complaining – nothing funny there. I was re-educated with a two-hour monologue on family values. He did like the one about Maria, our next-door neighbour, who sent over arroz con pollo containing one of their few, precious chickens, because she said the Americanos were like helpless children who didn’t know a plantain from a banana, and she didn’t want to see the family go hungry.
I made one last swipe at Laurie’s face, smearing rather than clearing the oily, tan spread that kept my daughter from starving. Back in Baltimore, this would have warranted a stop for soap, water and a paper towel or two. But now, clean enough.
‘Daddy, make us go sideways again,’ Laurie squealed into Richard’s ear, her dimpled arm around his neck like a sausage necklace. He kissed her sticky fingers.
‘Get back into your seatbelt, Baby Girl. I’ll see what I can do.’
I looked over at my husband. His pulsing right temple told me what I needed to know: he was in charge; he would take care of us. Nothing to worry about. I loved that about him. I had gone from my parents’ house to Richard’s house with only a summer vacation between college and marriage, and neither my parents nor my husband wanted me to worry. I agreed with them. We drove on in silence, passing walled compounds topped with razor wire guarded by armed sentries. Nicaragua was not Costa Rica. Mostly we saw shacks with dusty bodies – difficult to differentiate rib-defined children and dogs – scrabbling together in barren yards. Every now and then an orange-and-gold lantana bush rose out of the jaundiced dust, like a lamp that had no visible power source.
‘Daddy, I need to go pee,’ said Chloe Kate, our seven-year-old.
‘Cara, didn’t I tell you to take them when we stopped at the border?’
That tone again. I turned my hand, palm up, and swiped my ring across my lap. It left a dirty streak, like a layer of itself, only the wrong colour, on my favourite pink skirt, the one that swished around my knees like an upside down tulip gone soft on its stem.
‘I’m sorry. With all those kids begging around the car, I forgot. Maybe we can stop at the next town.’ A bit of blue night-sky peeked out from between my fingers balled up in my lap. I must have been squeezing pretty hard, because when I unclenched, the ring had left behind a perfect pink imprint, like a negative. It matched my skirt.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, with a tight smile, he said loudly enough for the back seat to hear, ‘You sound just like your mother with those damn excuses, Cara.’
‘Daddy said a cuss word, Daddy said a cuss word,’ Chloe Kate chanted, bouncing up and down, her stubby braids flying like small blond birds.
‘Hey, CK,’ Richard said, reaching back to tickle our middle daughter, ‘sometimes grown-ups say things to sh
ow how they feel. When you’re twenty-one, you can use that word. Until then, it’s only for Daddy.’
‘How about Mommy? She’s twenty-one.’
‘I don’t need words like that. I have other ways to share my feelings,’ I told our daughter quietly.
‘Yes, Mommy has other ways, don’t you, Cara?’
Richard delivered his rhetorical question with his loaded eyes aimed at me, invisible to the back seat. I silently leaned away and looked out at a walled compound, almost elegant, except for odd circular pockmarks. I saw them on several more buildings, until the whole town seemed the victim of an unfortunate, scarring rash. I wondered if the random pattern was intentional, a native architectural statement, or the result of sub-standard, sandy concrete.
‘Dad, look at all those bullet holes. Wow, there must have been some gigantic fight here,’ Daniel said from the back seat.
Of course. Even my ten-year-old son recognised real life when he saw it. Goosebumps rose on my hot skin. This was the closest I had ever been to violence. By choice. No horror, car chase or war movies for me. When I was growing up, I had yearned for stories about choosing teams for canoe races across lakes with Indian names. Instead, I had heard about selections, wrong lines and camps where the prize was living another day. They probably didn’t think I was listening. The closest I got to Frankenstein was with the Three Stooges as bodyguards. I even closed my eyes when Wile E. Coyote got flattened for the thousandth time by an Acme anvil.
The town appeared deserted as we drove through slowly, looking for somewhere to stop. I saw an open door leading to a jacaranda-shaded courtyard, full of children and adults celebrating something, maybe a birthday. I made eye contact with a black-haired woman whose smile disappeared as mine widened. I leaned out the window and, just as I was about to try out my Spanglish, her door slammed shut, as if it had been a mistake that it had been opened at all. We rode on in silence, except for Chloe Kate whining in the back about the heat. We circled the empty town square, looking for some sign of hospitality. There was none.