When we finally reached the Crossroads, the park was quiet. I pulled up in front of Penny’s unit, my foot keeping the brake. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay at the house?”
“I told you, I’m fine.” She unbuckled her seat belt and began collecting her things, retrieving the cellphone from where it landed in the console when she threw it. She pulled her purse into her lap, hesitating. “Will you be all right?”
“Will you?” I asked.
“We have to try to get some sleep.”
“Okay,” I said. Then, “How?”
She turned in her seat and covered her face with her hands. I waited for whatever came next: for Penny to change her mind, to talk me into the next unsavory thing we had to do. Instead she reached for me like a child, the way I had seen little boys and girls raise their arms for their parents, the way I had reached for mine. I hugged her gently, tucking my chin in the hollow of her shoulder, closing my eyes. When she finally let go, she didn’t meet my eyes. She opened her door and lifted the milk crate out of the truck. I stayed until she made it up the stairs, balancing the crate between her hip and the ledge to unlock the door. She turned on the lights and looked back over her shoulder, her hands too full to wave. I flashed the brights once, twice, and drove away.
18
The burned-out house smelled like damp wood and mold, the rich, peaty smell of animal droppings. The animals themselves were long gone, abandoning this forlorn shelter for greener pastures. In the middle of the room was a picnic bench, stolen from the high school and mysteriously transported, tagged with Sharpied doodles, hearts carved into the resin, sheltering the initials of quixotic couples KH + PL, JP + RS, YUNG B LUVS GS 4EVER. One of the walls of the house had been broken through and a panel of corrugated roof lay propped against the studs, dragged in by one of the transients who sought temporary shelter; the hitchhikers who materialized when construction began on the freeway junction two years earlier, disappearing when it was done.
I lowered myself gingerly onto the bench. It rocked but held. Penny straddled the opposite side, her seat more secure or her balance superior. She grinned as if reading my mind. We set out our cans of soda, our sandwiches wrapped in paper.
“Next time we can ride bikes here,” she said, trading out the second half of her sandwich with half of mine. “It’s not so far.”
“I don’t know how to ride a bike,” I said, shrugged at the look she gave me. “Lamb was always working. I tried to teach myself once. It didn’t turn out well. Who taught you?”
“Who do you think?” she asked, and though I tried my best to conjure her family—the older brother I knew she had, the mother I remembered dimly—the picture was hazy in its particulars. The answer arrived in spontaneous image. A young Flaca pointing out the training wheels with militant focus, offering curt instructions. I had to laugh. Penny sighed.
“What else didn’t Lamb teach you, nerd?”
“I don’t know. I’m useless in a sword fight.”
Penny dug in her purse and pulled out a marker. I recognized the fat white stem, swiped from the dry-erase board in the diner’s back room. She smoothed a corner of her sandwich’s butcher paper and drew a series of flat lines, then, leaving some space, sketched a long, narrow pole with a flat base; a hook at the pole’s apex sturdy enough to hold the body that would swing if I proved unable to predict the occupations of her mind. This was a game that depended as much on what I knew about Penny as what I didn’t, the memories she did or didn’t have, the places and movies and flavors she preferred. She tapped the first blank space with the marker’s cap, looking expectant.
“You’re supposed to give me a category,” I said, but I could feel the tide beginning to turn. I had fast-forwarded past this moment to the next, after this body hung and the keen, ruthless pole demanded another. When it would be my turn to string one up, I would draw a hand and hair and fingernails and pants, his shoes like two oblong shapes; a watch, a hat, an overcoat, gloves. I would create numerous, layered opportunities for his subsisting. I would make a man who lives forever.
“It’s a place,” Penny said, tapping the paper again, the first of three blank lines, followed by six lines, then five. She was watching me the way Trixie did in the mornings when Lamb sent her to my room to bring me down for breakfast, because I refused to appear for breakfast anymore. Trixie sat politely on the floor of my room to wait, tilting her head this way, then that, one gingerbread ear flopping forward. Why don’t you get out of bed, she meant to say, but how could I explain that I seemed to have lost all desire? I couldn’t do anything but stare at her with my arms and legs drawn up on the mattress. If I didn’t move for a very long time, Trixie would begin to bark.
“Lourdes’ rich tía got married there,” Penny said. She was watching me, too, having grown familiar enough with my moods not to ask. Didn’t Penny have moods of her own. One late morning, I arrived at the diner to find her sitting at a booth by the window, looking forlorn and adolescent in two French braids, her tips counted into a small, neat pile. I brought her a cup of coffee and a slice of pecan pie. I would let Penny tell me in her own time, the things that ate her up. I was already too full on anguish, the nebulous vapor creeping, creeping in.
“Just try,” she said.
36
The day after I visited Flaca at the panadería, I went to work and came home to find Lamb’s truck already in the drive. Inside the house felt muted, dogless; there was an abrupt, wretched feeling, as if all the dogs might have vanished along with Penny’s. I walked through the kitchen calling their names until I noticed the back door propped open to the yard. Wolf was near the grade, sniffing at something unlucky in the brush. Trixie lolled in the dirt on her back, paws kicking at nothing. When I stepped outside Wolf looked up to check if I had brought him a treat. I called them firmly in a tone they couldn’t refuse, their contracts stipulating a certain obedience. They trotted over, reluctant, and I took a seat on the ground, draping my arms around Wolf to pull him in for a hug. He resisted, panting a little. Trixie mistook the purpose of my visit altogether, splaying out, settling her head between her paws. It ruined the feeling a little, their disinclination, but they were only dogs, and it must have been exhausting for them to keep reminding me.
From inside the house came a muffled sound, Lamb hollering for the dogs, or for me. They heard it, too, their ears pricking up, but they didn’t bother to move. I stood and went back inside, picking my way past the quiet kitchen and the front room with Lamb’s empty reading chair, his wire-rimmed glasses folded neatly on the arm. At the bottom of the staircase I looked up, expecting to see him standing on the landing, wearing his new favorite expression of pinched consternation.
“Lamb?” I called out, but when no answer came I took the stairs two at a time, hesitating outside his closed door. I would like to say that after breaking into Penny’s house, the density of all borders had become permeable, but the truth is I have never been any good at respecting boundaries. I have wanted things and hearts and people; I have always tried to make them mine.
Lamb was bent over his bureau in a cotton undershirt, clutching a fistful of loose denim at the waistband of his jeans, the sum total between his past and present selves. With his other hand he gripped the lip of the dresser, looking strained, a film of perspiration on his forehead. For the first time I noticed the stale air in the room, its odor of ointment, illness, dust. I went to the window and pushed the curtains aside, cracking it open. I returned to Lamb and flattened my hand against his damp back, his bones distinct ridges underneath my fingertips.
“Come sit down—”
“A shirt and a belt.”
“I’ll get it. Can you sit down?”
“A goddamn shirt!”
A beat went by, long enough for hope to wither. He remained stooped, adhered to the dresser, glaring at me as if I had grown a second head, as if I had made this all happen with my own careles
sness, my slovenly negligence. And didn’t I agree? I forced myself to walk to his closet and rifle through the familiar array of neatly pressed shirts on their hangers. My favorite, a green plaid with buttons like moonstone, the cotton worn at the tips of the collar, the edges of sleeve. I will dress him as if he were my child, and he will flourish. I undid the buttons and stepped up to him cautiously, holding the shirt open. He made no effort to straighten or raise an arm.
“You’re going to have to let go of the dresser for a second. Put your hand on my shoulder.”
“We’re going to be late.”
“Where are we going?”
“Your mother is waiting.”
I folded the shirt over my shoulder. “What?”
“Find me a belt that fits.”
I felt his back again, recognizing the heat of fever. I pressed my fingers against his forehead, his breath a papery wheeze. The only possible mother—two—Catherine, or Catherine’s daughter. I had heard of the original father-daughter custom, the younger Lambert pair piling into the truck at every dusk to fetch Catherine from the telephone company in Noe where she logged customer complaints. I glanced at the clock above the dresser. It was already two hours, and twenty years, too late.
“Lamb. All your belts are too big now.”
“Your mother’s sick of your excuses.” He spat it, his anger so savage that I had to look away, my eyes skimming over the scarred dresser and the full-length mirror angled in the corner, the reflection of a wizened old man and a young girl trapped inside. My skin was still bronzed from the mountain hike with Penny; his, never any shade deeper than pale. My resemblance to Lamb most evident in a scowl and a right-leaning stride, a penchant for simple things. It was in our blood, but it had skipped our faces. If I hadn’t taken his name, would anyone even know I was his?
I left him then, and in the hall picked up the phone to call the doctor, scared of the ringing line and what to say in it. Hello? I’d like to report an emergency. Everything, everything.
When it was over, I went across the hall to my bedroom, kneeling in front of my dresser, tugging out the bottom drawer. I sifted through the remnants of a lucky life, picking up each object and laying them down on the floor. A miniature felt teddy bear from the Golden Bear Casino. A plastic charm bracelet from the pizza parlor’s vending machine. A brontosaurus valentine constructed in fourth grade art class. Every one of Wolf’s discarded leashes, the last one six feet long of sturdy braided nylon. I grabbed a pair of scissors and brought the leash across the hall to Lamb, displaying my find like a prize.
“Eleanor?” he said.
We fashioned the leash into a second life, double-knotted at the waist.
37
I rode in the back seat of the ambulance on a thinly padded bench. The EMT was a pale, frog-faced boy just a few years out of school. He crouched over Lamb, sticking electrodes on his exposed chest, calling to a second man who scribbled on a clipboard Lamb’s pulse, Lamb’s blood pressure, Lamb’s rate of respiration, all numerical calculations of Lamb’s subsistence. They pushed up his sleeve and one moonstone button popped free from a cuff, skittering across the floor. The boy inserted a needle into Lamb’s vein, the second man holding a bladder of clear fluid above Lamb’s head, the boy click, click on the drip. Beyond his shallow breath Lamb was treading a pool of morphine. The second man asked for a timeline of Lamb’s last meals and medications, symptoms scaffolding a path to this misfortune.
“I don’t know,” I said, meaning all of it. For years, I’d washed Lamb’s socks, made his coffee, polished his boots, pressed his clothes. I thought about him at every meal, as in What did Lamb eat for lunch today? What would Lamb like for dinner? But with his illness I was given no say. Even before the blood in the sink, hadn’t I known something was wrong? Oh, I knew, I knew. I hung mantras of casualty in my mind like paper garlands. Name the thing you fear the most, and it will never come to pass. The line seemed like something plucked from the pages of a book. How many years with Lamb had I squandered to books, the unserviceable blank space between two lines?
“You okay?” The boy reached across Lamb, shaking my knee. “Hello? We can’t have you passing out. Look away if you want.”
“Where? There are no windows.” We were in a metal box on wheels, a wailing canister of alarm. I didn’t need a window to know where we were headed. I shut my eyes against the sirens echoing in my skull, the ambulance’s jerky starts and stops over potholed freeway until we began picking our way through Tehacama’s local roads in the direction of the hospital. Finally they cut the sirens, the boy pushed open the ambulance doors and hopped out into late afternoon, clattering Lamb’s gurney onto the drive.
The hospital had aged poorly since the last time I’d last seen it, the paint chipping off the stucco facade. We rattled Lamb’s gurney through the front lobby, past cramped waiting rooms doused with the acrid scent of bleach. A coffee cart was parked near the elevator; a stooped old man with grizzled knots of hair shorn close to his scalp dispensed cups of pungent sludge to tired faces. There was a taut, transitional energy humming through the halls, a current of anguish moving from room to room.
On the fourth floor I followed the EMTs down an air-conditioned corridor to a petite nurse standing in wait, tapping a pen against the clipboard at her hip as if she were keeping time; as if we were wasting hers. She kicked the brake on Lamb’s bed hard enough to make the gurney rattle.
“Watch it,” I said, reaching out to steady the bed. She didn’t seem to hear. Across the hall, another gurney was parked outside cardiology, an older man stretched under the white sheet, visible only in profile. His eyes were closed but his lips were moving. An older woman stood nearby; his wife, I assumed. She was dressed smartly in starched slacks and a square jacket, a low, sensible heel. I watched them for several minutes, their voices faint impressions across the distance. Whatever he said next, she threw her head back to laugh at his joke, her whole body relaxing as if she’d taken off her stiff clothes and shaken them out before climbing back into them again. I wished Catherine were here for Lamb, too, though in the end this place would come between the couple across the hall, it would divide us all. One of a pair, always left behind.
The nurse wheeled Lamb’s bed through a labyrinth of hospital corridors until we came to an empty room. She raised the metal guardrails on his bed, connecting various tubes and wires to several nearby machines. My old affliction, a pre-Penny condition of invisibility, had returned. I stood in the corner of the room while the nurse switched on a small monitor by the bed. The reassuring, steady beep of Lamb’s heartbeat filled the room. She left without asking my name.
There was a single hard chair by the wall. I took a seat on the doctor’s stool instead, rolling over to the medical cabinet to paw through the glass jars of cotton balls, tongue depressors, and alcohol swabs, searching the drawers for lollipops. There was no candy to be found, only a weathered home decor magazine I flipped through in boredom. An hour ticked by before the baby-faced doctor finally arrived, the same mousy nurse in tow, bustling as if she’d just come from one emergency and was headed shortly to another. She pulled out a drawer underneath the sink and snapped open a folded gown.
“Fever’s high,” the doctor said, looking over Lamb’s chart. “Likely an infection. We’ll run some tests. You have to know he hasn’t been taking his medication.”
“He did. He was.”
“I can tell from the bloodwork, Cale. If the cancer’s spread, and I suspect it has, there’s only so much we can do.”
“What does that mean?”
“I suggested a more aggressive approach months ago.”
“Suggested to whom? Lamb?” I gestured toward the bed, Lamb sleeping on, oblivious.
The doctor made a face, sympathy or something like it. I realized I was standing, that I had gotten to my feet when the doctor entered the room. I sat back down on the stool and arranged my hands in
my lap like two limp, unfeeling animals. All the things they used to do! The person they had belonged to.
“We’ll need to stabilize him before we try anything else, okay? One step at a time. We should get the results back tomorrow. Why don’t you head home? He’s probably going to sleep through most of this.”
“I’ll stay.”
The nurse pressed a button on the side of Lamb’s bed. The top half of his mattress rose steadily, bringing him up to a sitting position. His eyes fluttered open. I waited for him to take in the room, the nurse. For his lips to form the name of his favorite daughter, his second chance, the way he used to say it. Cale.
He coughed, a wet sound, followed by gasping, as if he were being strangled all by himself. It happened before I could look away—Lamb expelling yellow rivers down his chin and the front of his gown, hot, sour-smelling vomit pouring out, and it just kept coming. The nurse jumped back, crashing into Lamb’s IV, his beeping machines. I reached over to steady the pole, brushing against her cool, fleshy arm. She moved toward the medical cabinet and knocked over a tray of kidney dishes in an attempt to grab one. The doctor seized a box of nitrile gloves from the counter and hollered for the nurses down the hall. I was amazed at the sheer volume of liquid Lamb was spewing forth; I tried to make myself small, afraid that if Lamb saw me, he would be embarrassed. But Lamb wasn’t seeing anything; he was glassy-eyed, feverish. Strange faces crowded in the doorway, two more nurses and a stern, bespectacled resident in a white coat. They swarmed the room, wiping at Lamb, pulling the bedding, calling for a second gurney. Still the bile poured from his nose and mouth, and since he had eaten nothing, I could only imagine from where it came. The doctor’s face had grown red. “Get her out! There’s blood here. Don’t lose the catheter.”
A Prayer for Travelers Page 14