by Amanda Dykes
She runs her hand over the engraving, thinking of the hands that had leaned upon it.
Presented by The Boston Post
to the
Oldest Citizen
of
Ansel-by-the-Sea,
Maine
And in parentheses along the lower curve of the knob, the words To Be Transmitted.
Sharp, those words are. To be passed on, once the life of the holder is no more. A shallow intake of breath, and a vague prayer. Please, not yet. Don’t let him . . . transmit . . . yet.
Where the outside world might look upon such a tradition as morbid, those in Ansel still hold it as a high honor, and a testimony to the natural handing down of life, love, and wisdom between generations. And no one deserves that honor more than Bob—though she still wonders at his possessing the cane.
She leans it back in its place and takes hold of Bob’s hand. “We never were much for words, were we, GrandBob?”
There’s no dry witty comment in response, and her heart aches. She squeezes his hand and pulls out her backpack. A quick zip and she pulls out her mandolin, lays it on her lap.
A nurse comes in, and her quick pace and efficiency is cheerful. “Hey, Bob,” she says, as if he had greeted her wide awake. “Got some visitors, I see. Looks like your friend brought a girlfriend.” She smiles and winks at Ann.
“Oh, um . . .” Ann stands. “No, that’s not it.” She blushes as Jeremiah looks up from his book.
His face is set, his jaw clenched as if that should tell the woman there couldn’t be a more preposterous idea. The rigid lines dissipate as he turns toward the woman. “Hey, Shirley. How’s Jim holding up?”
“He is about to go crazy, being kept home all day. He’s itching to get back to work. But it’ll be a while yet before he can get back on the boat.”
Jeremiah shakes his head slowly. “It’s enough to drive a guy mad, having to sit still.” He looks to Ann. “Her husband was in a fishing accident.”
“I’m so sorry,” Ann says.
“Now, don’t you worry,” Shirley says, her warmth easy. “We all know it’s part of the life, and we’re lucky he escaped the rope before it dragged him into the water.” She nods emphatically. “But, Fletch, if you wouldn’t mind droppin’ in for a visit this week, I think it’d make his sanity stretch another day at least.”
Jeremiah tips his baseball cap. “I’d be honored,” he says, and Ann can tell he means it. He changes the subject. “This is Annie Bliss. She’s Bob’s niece.”
“Great-niece,” Ann says.
“I’ll say.” Shirley smiles. “The way Mr. Robert talks about you, we all think you’re pretty great around here.”
A flicker of hope dances around Ann. Bob had talked? “But I thought he couldn’t—”
“Bless your heart, sweet girl, I’m sorry. He is unconscious, yes. I meant before. We all know Mr. Robert from way back.”
“Mr. Robert?”
Shirley waves a hand. “Oh, you know. Your Bob. My mother always called him Mr. Robert. There was a sort of hallowedness about his name for a while, you know. ’Til he up and started going by Bob, as if he’s just your average fella. But he’ll always be Mr. Robert to lots of us around these parts. And rest assured, we’re taking good care of him. Has anyone gone over things with you?”
She nods, recalling what Bess said at the diner. “A little. Do you think he’ll wake up?” Ann distances herself from the words in order to speak them.
“Lord knows we’re hoping and praying—and doing everything we can.” She puts a hand on Ann’s back and rubs her thumb in the gesture of a mother’s care. “The doctors put him in an induced coma, to give him time to heal. When they think he’s ready, they’ll take him off the medication. Then after that . . . well, it is serious, but we’re hopeful he’ll wake up.”
She checks some tubes and monitors, then turns to go. “Play that thing,” she says, jabbing her finger toward the forgotten mandolin. “It’ll do him good. Do us all some good, truth be told.”
She nods and, as Shirley exits, begins to pick. Slow, bright notes. No song in particular—just a wandering melody. There’s an intensity coming from the corner, and she opens her eyes to see Jeremiah watching her. He looks quickly back at his book and she can’t help smiling.
“Where’d you learn to play?” Jeremiah asks.
She keeps picking, remembering what it was like to hold this instrument in her hands for the first time.
She dips her head toward Bob. “Him,” she says, and Jeremiah nods as if he already knew, as if that made all the sense in the world. “I came to stay with him for a summer when I was ten. My father was already deployed, and my mother was sent out before he returned. There was a three-month overlap, and he took me in. I was as lost a thing as you could find.” The notes ease the air and coax more words out. “Not a clue who I was, where I was going, or even where I came from. I didn’t feel like a whole person. Just a handful of pieces, not sure how they all fit together.”
She laughs dryly. Some of that is still true. “One day Bob brought me into his sitting room. The dust was dancing all around in the sun shafts, and this was sitting on the sofa. I remember . . . just touching it, afraid to pick it up. He told me I wasn’t going to break anything by picking it up, and when I held it, it felt as if I were holding a whole unopened universe in my hands—one I didn’t have the keys to. And he said . . .” She squints, remembering.
“Let me guess,” Jeremiah says. “Something like . . . if everything around you is broken, it’s time to unbreak something.”
“Yes,” Ann says, studying. How did he know? “He said it was time to be a part of the unbreaking, of the making of something. He told me there was a Carpenter who was going to build me right up, too.”
And that had been what it felt like in those early days of stumbling around notes on the mandolin. Stringing together notes that by themselves did a markedly clumsy nothing, but woven together they were magic.
Jeremiah nods. “Yep. Sounds about right.” His is the look of someone who knows.
She stops playing and offers the instrument to him. “Do you play?”
“Not so much.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and wanders to the window. “Hey, I’m going to go get some coffee. What’ll it be?”
And just like that, he’s halfway to the door, withdrawing from whatever it was they had just shared. “Tea? Coffee?” He snaps, pointing. “Smoothie.”
“Water?” She reaches to grab her purse, give him some money. But he waves her off.
“I got it.”
When he’s gone, she stands and wanders the room. Someone has made it feel as much a home as possible. A worn book of Robert Frost poetry, and beneath that, an even more worn Bible. Same one he’d had all those years ago. She pulls out the drawer, and inside there’s a paper folder, the kind with pockets and three bronze-colored fasteners. She runs her fingers down notebook paper inside, filled with clippings from Rusty Joe’s, just like hers. All her thirty-word messages to him, going back and back for years.
Several pages in, there’s a torn piece of paper stuck in like a bookmark.
“What are you up to, GrandBob?” She looks at the man and can almost see a smile hiding just a millisecond away on his face.
Something starts to beep, and she steps back. Has she broken something? Is Bob okay? She makes for the door, for help, only to be met by Shirley walking in.
“Don’t you worry, honey. I just need to change his IV bag.”
Ann breathes her thanks, relieved. She leans against the stack of books near Bob, feeling she should be doing something to help. “It looks like someone’s brought some of Bob’s things,” she said. “Has Bess been here?”
Shirley looks at her, amused. “Yes, indeed. But if you want to know who made it like this, think again. There’s only one person who’s come every single day. Hates being here as much as Bob would if he were awake, but he comes, and never empty-handed.”
“He?”
Shirley looks at her as if she’s dull of brain. “Jeremiah Fletcher,” she says.
If Jeremiah Fletcher brought the folder, had he read her clippings? She doesn’t know whether to feel glad for Bob . . . or utterly mortified for herself.
“He sits and reads Bob’s two favorite books.” Waving a finger between the Bible and the folder of clippings, Shirley continues. “That man. You’d have to pull all his teeth twice over to get him to stand up and make a speech in front of a crowd. But give him a solitary soul, and he’ll sit for hours with them.”
She clicks a button on a CD player on the other bedstand. The sound of ocean waves rushes in around them. “He brought that contraption, too, but I gotta say, what he brought today takes the cake.” She winks and leaves.
Ann follows her out into the hallway and catches up. “What did he bring today?” She hadn’t seen Jeremiah bring anything in.
“Why, everything, honey.” She smiles. “He brought you.”
Jeremiah is shuffling down the hall from the other direction, water bottle in hand. She watches him pause outside the hall window, face somber as he studies Bob. And it occurs to her he’s giving her his own time with the man.
“Shirley?”
“Mm-hmm?” The woman is busy at the computer, noting numbers on a chart.
“Is there a business center here? Somewhere I could check in with my work?”
“Now, what kind of people do you work for that won’t let you alone to visit a loved one in the hospital?” She plants her hands on her hips as if she’s offering to take them on.
“I just need to send a quick email,” she says. And to clear out to let Jeremiah have some time with Bob. “They’re waiting on a report I was supposed to have in two days ago, but they gave me an extension.”
Something goes cold in her. It’s a report about consumers. People, turned into numbers, taking her away from the one person who set her heart to beating for others in the first place.
“Sure, honey. Go on down a floor. There’s a place near the coffee kiosk.”
The “place” turns out to be a table in the corner with a yellowed plastic-framed monitor and a dial-up Internet connection that beeps into a static stream. But the slower pace of things matches this corner of the world, where people are out working land and sea instead of tapping fingers and staring into computer screens all day long.
Accessing her email, she sends the report she’d saved in her drafts and, finding she has cell-phone reception in the hospital, makes a couple of calls. She takes her time walking back to the room, stopping to look at the large historical photographs lining the corridor. Lumberjacks. Men walking on islands of logs rolling down rivers, breaking ice and tangles of great tree trunks upon water. Courage.
When she rounds the hall to Bob’s room, a new voice drifts from within. “. . . hopeful,” it says, deep but subdued. “But too soon to tell.”
She peers through the open blinds and sees a doctor, white-coated. He faces Jeremiah, who stands tall with his arms crossed, nodding. Shirley stands near the window, taking notes. Jeremiah asks a question she can’t hear, and the doctor answers. “Weeks,” he says, “if not months. Coming back from a coma at an advanced age . . .” He goes on, talking of residential physical therapy, outpatient physical therapy.
And all she can see is Bob’s strong hand wrapped around hers, pulling her up when she tripped, as if she weighed no more than a feather. Those same hands, cradling hers to pull out a splinter with a gentleness to rival his strength.
“Will you be available to assist him in his recovery?”
They’re asking this guy. A stranger. Some scruffy man who’s nothing to Bob? She lets the burn of it scorch right over the fact that there’s a reason they don’t know to ask her. She’s in the room now, and just as Jeremiah opens his mouth to say something, she speaks.
“I will.” Her words are firm, much bolder than she feels.
Three pairs of eyes are on her, the machine’s quiet beeping ticking off seconds.
“I’m sorry.” The white-haired doctor adjusts his glasses. “You are . . .” He flips through the clipboard in his hands, as if that will tell him.
“Next of kin,” she says. “Almost. I’m his great-niece. Ann Bliss.” She draws up her shoulders, offers her hand. He takes it.
“You understand, Ms. Bliss, that his rehabilitation, if he awakes, will be extensive.”
As had been hers. And he’d never given up on her. “When he wakes up”—she knows the odds are stacked against him, but she refuses to use that cutting word, if—“I’ll learn whatever I need to, get him wherever he needs to go.”
Jeremiah’s looking at her as if she’s just jumped off a cliff . . . and maybe doesn’t know how to swim.
Shirley, on the other hand, is beaming. Ann stands a little taller and hushes the nagging voices clamoring for her to remember reports, limited vacation days, to-do lists.
But then she looks at Bob lying there, face mapped in wrinkles carved from compassion.
There’s a way. There has to be.
nine
“So,” Jeremiah begins as they make their way back to the wharf, “that was . . .” The corners of his mouth turn down as if he’s pondering, searching for just the right words.
Ann raises her eyebrows, waits.
“You’re going to care for Bob,” he says.
“Of course.” She could do without his skepticism, but she does like the way he leaves off that dreaded if clause at the end. “Well, maybe not if he has anything to say about it. If Bob knew we were talking about him convalescing, how to help him along, he’d bark at us to quit our nonsense and tell us he’d do just fine on his own.”
Jeremiah chuckles. “True.”
At the boat, she hesitates before getting on. This is ridiculous. Pressing her eyes closed, she swallows back nerves and steps aboard.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” For some reason wanting him to understand, she reaches for a story. “It’s stupid. When I was a kid visiting Bob, he figured out I was pretty scared of the ocean. I shouldn’t have been. I was raised on it. My parents had a boat and started taking me out when I was a baby. My mom would tie up a scrap of old sail like a miniature hammock between two posts on the deck, and the ocean would rock me to sleep.”
The past uncoils like a fiddlehead fern, a tender ache with it.
“So what happened?”
Ann shrugs. She’s not ready to go there, not with a stranger. “Things change,” she says, and moves on. “Anyway, when I got here, Bob tried to take me out on his boat every day for a week. I couldn’t do it. I could hardly get up courage to talk, let alone face a whole ocean. So on the seventh day, he brought me down to the dock and started whistling an old hymn. He had something rolled up under his arm, and I watched him unroll it. It was a rectangle of canvas. He’d drenched it in glue and covered it in sand, then let it dry.” She could still feel the way fear dropped away to make room for curiosity.
“He said, ‘Sand’s nothing but little rocks, Annie. And rocks are nothing but little earth. Solid ground, no matter what waves are thrashing around you.’ He pointed at the sand and said, ‘Get on your rock and let’s get on with living. We’re going to sea, girl.’”
It wasn’t until much later that she realized he’d been talking about a whole lot more than literal rocks and water.
“Sounds like Bob,” Jeremiah says, the edge gone from his voice. He motors the boat out of the Machiasport harbor, and she can’t help but notice he seems to be going slower, turning more gently. They ride in silence, green islands rising like low hills from the sea, all pine clad and granite skirted.
On the left, sheer bluffs rise as towers—Gretel Point, as she recalls, the signal that they’re nearing Ansel Harbor. But where they should have turned, hugged the point to head on home, Jeremiah continues straight.
“I have to make a stop.” He tips his head toward the bins of mail.
Ann checks her watch—12:37—and can almost h
ear his eyes rolling. She doesn’t blame him. He’s been up since before dark, going who knew where, and is probably tired, hungry, and behind on his own work. Sure, she needs to find some sort of Internet, catch up on more emails. But he’d given up half of his workday to bring her to see Bob.
“Of course,” she says. “Let me know what I can do to help.”
“You could steer this boat, for starters.” He leaves the wheel and tromps toward the bins. “That’d free me up to get the mail ready—”
“What?” She springs to her feet, panicked. No one’s at the helm. Helm? They called it that still, right? No one’s there. “I don’t know the first thing about steering a boat.”
“Sure you do,” he says. “Just hold us straight.”
She gulps, grips the wheel, and holds it, eyes glued to the dizzying waves. They pass Bob’s island on the left, and she sees something in the daylight that escaped her when they passed it last night. There’s a fence around it now. Chain link and sad, like a worn and saggy garment. It captures her attention, and she realizes with a start that she’s let her hands follow, veering the boat closer to it. Quickly she corrects, feeling the boat respond, and stiffens as it registers that she’s really steering this thing. And knowing her, she’ll go horribly wrong somehow.
She doesn’t realize how tense she is until Jeremiah returns and steps behind her. He’s careful in the small space, but his hand brushes hers as he slides it onto the rung beside the outer rim. There’s a steadiness to his touch.
“See? Nothing to it.” She notices again how he doesn’t drop his ending Gs, like the Down Easters do.