“No, I just mean that he was sincere. He believed all that. Opportunism or whatever, you know. I mean sincerity isn’t necessarily a thing that would define quality in a poem. Do you—do you like the rhymes?
Do they seem too much?”
“Well, there are certainly a lot of them and you certainly have an ear for them.”
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“Thank you. I don’t use a rhyming dictionary, you know.”
“Very impressive,” says the old priest.
The phone rings—a blessed interruption. Brother Fire answers it.
Holly Grey is on the other end, talking loudly to be heard over some commotion in the background. Fiona, she says, is doing dishes and isn’t happy about it. Holly wants him to come visit Oliver Ward in the hospital, to help cheer him up. Holly goes on to say that he has always had the power to cheer anyone up, to make a person feel the essential gorgeousness of life, and Oliver Ward seems low these days, discouraged and sorry and maybe beginning to wonder if he’ll ever leave the hospital alive.
“I’m so tired,” Brother Fire tells her. “It’s morning, and I’m exhausted.”
“That doesn’t sound like you at all,” Holly says. “You sound like you need cheering up.”
“As usual,” Brother Fire says, “you put things in perspective for me.”
“Now you’re cheering me up. I don’t need cheering up.”
“I’m only speaking the truth,” he tells her.
“Can we talk after mass today?” Holly says.
2.
Early Sunday night, at the end of her shift, Alison receives an emergency call—she and Roy are the nearest vehicle to the scene of an accident. They arrive only minutes after it happened. It’s the coldest night of the fall, with a needlepoint rain being swept by gales. The American flag atop the car dealership down the way is blown straight out by the wind. The streetlights sway and shake and seem about to fly off their wires. And here, in this scene of a car askew in the road next to a broken streetlamp pole, is a man lying on his back, hands folded over his stomach, one leg up into the thrown-open front door. It looks as though he simply decided to lie down here and rest. The car is a Ford Taurus. A woman kneels at his side, crying and moving her hands back t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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and forth over him in what looks like a frantic grasping at the rain falling on him. Alison moves quickly, gets in close, and ascertains that the man is breathing freely, though unconscious; then she reaches over and takes hold of the woman’s arms, looking into her frightened eyes. “Don’t move him, okay? Don’t let him move, especially his head. Keep him still. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” the woman says. “Thank you.”
Roy has already set out a couple of flares and is redirecting traffic.
Alison moves to the squad car and pulls it around, lights flashing; she gets out the small first-aid kit, with its portable defibrillator and gauze packets, and pulls a blanket from the trunk of the squad car. The woman says something behind her, a plaintive note in her voice. Between them is the street, with its wet reflection of the red and blue flashes.
“Don’t go, Clark. Please? Stay with me?”
Alison bends into this scene and puts the blanket over the man, who opens his eyes and looks at her and seems about to scream.
“Please, Clark,” says the woman.
Alison puts part of the blanket over the woman’s shoulders. The couple are enfolded, and the scene looks almost tranquil in the shifting light, a tableau of love huddled against the rain and the cold wind.
“Baby,” the man says, gasping. “I love you.”
“Yes,” she says, crying.
“I love you, baby,” he says, sighs, gasps out. “I love you.” Then, with a little jolt along the muscles of his jaw, he’s still. Gone. The eyes remain open, reflecting light.
Alison labors over him, uses the defibrillator, breathes into his mouth. Nothing works. The woman kneels, wailing, there in the highway, in the badly chaotic flashing. Alison embraces her even as she resists any contact at all. “No, no, no,” she keeps saying, “no, no, no, no.”
The ambulance comes, stops too slowly, it seems, inching forward with its weird, fragmented siren-sound, and at last two paramedics get out. They move quickly now, with their equipment, and soon they are bending over the man, working efficiently, steadily, muttering procedural words to each other. Alison hears, “No pulse.” The woman has 248
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fallen silent, watching them. Every single thing about the night seems suspended now, locked in the moment, as if the wind has determined the seriousness of things and stilled itself, so that there is only the wild flickering, the vast, coldly drizzling dark above them, the little breath-ings of the medics, who keep trying and do finally get a pulse.
“Got it,” one of them says loudly, with something of coaxing in it, as if he were addressing the man lying there under his hands. “Got another. Come on.”
“Come on!” shouts the second paramedic.
And then they’re quiet again, quite still-voiced, breathing heavily, working. Alison sees the injured man’s hand move, and she almost cries out.
“Okay, pulse slightly below normal. Blood pressure rising nice. It’s good. We can transport him now.”
It seems a long time, a long wait. Alison directs traffic with Roy, while they get the man stabilized, ready to be moved. The man’s wife waits in the ambulance, having been given something to calm her. She sits there trembling, crying.
Alison thinks about her father, in his hospital bed, trying to recover. For her, now, the whole world seems scarily precarious and darkly threatened. The wind has come back with force, a seeming conscious surge of cold air, as if nature has decided at last to comment angrily on the outcome. The paramedics place the injured man in the back of the ambulance.
She turns from them to see Stanley standing there. She experiences a strong urge to walk into his arms. He says, “I saw you from three cars back. I know you’re on the job. Sorry.” He begins to move away.
“Wait,” Alison says, actually reaching for his arm, taking a hold of him at the wrist. “I was on my way to the station. I’m off now. Do you want to go have coffee or something?”
“Sure.”
“Follow us?”
He nods.
In the squad car heading for the station, Roy says, “I love this job.
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Where else can you see right away, directly, the good effect of what you’ve done? You saved that guy’s life.”
“They brought him back, not me.”
“You know how it is when somebody tries to open a jar, and can’t get it, and then the next person tries it and does get it? The first one got it started, right? You got it started and it was beautiful.”
“He was stopped, Roy. And nothing I tried worked.” She looks in the rearview mirror to be sure of Stanley’s car.
“But you kept him going. You kept the blood moving to his brain.
You saved his life. You must feel just terrific. I do for my little part in it. Really.”
“Well, it’s not supposed to be about what I feel, is it?”
“What’s with you?” he says. “You feel whatever you feel. Damn.”
Here’s Roy, with his little eyes and his big frame, sitting behind the wheel of the squad car, worrying about her.
“It’s okay,” she says to him. “I feel fine.”
And she does. She’s abruptly filled with a sense of anticipation, an excitement she knows is perfectly unwarranted and probably even silly.
Yet there is the car, following along behind her. She has a moment of recalling how it felt to be thinking of herself as sexy, looking forward to a date. It’s ridiculous. She’s in uniform.
They go to a Starbucks near the station. She has her car, so again he follows her. On the way, she uses the cell to call Holly and ask if she can be
a little late coming home. Holly says things are fine, Fiona and Kalie are making Thanksgiving decorations and Jonathan is reading a book about dinosaurs. “Take your time, dear,” Holly tells her.
The coffee shop is crowded, and they have to sit in the far window that looks out on the windy, drizzling street, with its entrance to Route 66, heading east.
Stanley goes to the counter to order, and she heads into the ladies’
room, where she stares at herself in the mirror and decides that this is only coffee with someone who wishes to work for her father. She thinks of putting lipstick on, but then doesn’t. Here is her face, her work face, under the police hat, small and smudged-seeming. She washes it, and then does apply a small touch of lipstick, hurrying. Her stomach aches 250
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a little. Outside, he’s seated at the table, gazing out the window. His shape is decidedly less lean when he’s sitting down: you can see the beginning of a paunch at his middle.
“That was something,” he says to her when she’s settled across from him.
“How much of it did you see?”
“I saw you working on him and then I saw them working on him.
They’re pretty efficient aren’t they? They didn’t even seem scared.”
“They weren’t. They see that kind of thing a lot.”
“And you?”
“Pardon?”
“Well, you too, right?”
“I write traffic citations. I’ve been called on a few domestic disputes.
One of them involving the ladies who are now my babysitters.”
“They had a dispute?”
She smiles. “You can’t find that hard to believe.”
“They’re so good-hearted, both of them. I mean, from what I’ve seen.”
“They are. They’ve been great since Dad’s trouble.”
“You know,” he says, “all those years ago, I used to look forward to working for your dad because I thought I’d see you.”
She sips the coffee and looks at his hands. They’re smooth-backed, almost feminine-looking. But now she can see the calloused palm of one of them, as he reaches for the little container of sugar packets on the table. Finally, she says, “I was still in school,” and realizes almost immediately the banality of it as a response.
“I wasn’t long out of school.”
She decides to try a joke: “I seem to remember that you were late a lot. And missed a lot of days.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That was me.”
“So,” she says, deciding this, too. “You met my father again, after so much time, in the Point Royal drunk tank.”
He nods carelessly, and then seems to come to his senses. “I don’t usually drink,” he says. “Gives me heartburn. Beer especially. I fell asleep in a phone booth after something like three beers. I’d been driving all night.”
“Tell me,” she says, “what you’ve been doing all this time?”
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He looks down. “Working. I had a place down in Knoxville. I kept busy, you know. Just putting food on the table.”
“Were you married?”
Now his gaze is directly at her. “Yeah. Didn’t last long.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, I wasn’t ready. And for that matter neither was she.”
“How old were you?”
“Oh, I was married back then. Back when I worked for Oliv—for your daddy.”
“And you moved to Knoxville—”
“She had family there. We lived with them for a couple years.”
“You didn’t want to live with her family.”
“No—actually we got along. It was her—you know? We just weren’t suited to each other, as they say. We tried though. I mean we weren’t casual about it. We got this place, you know. Little house. I left her the house. You could say it was a mess from the start.”
For a while, they’re quiet, sipping the coffee, and the others in the little shop provide them with something other than each other to pay attention to. Alison experiences this as a relief, but then the silence grows longer and she begins to feel embarrassed. She says, “I didn’t mean to seem to quiz you.”
He smiles. “It’s okay if you were.”
“Another thing I seem to remember is that Oliver liked you back then.”
But he has spoken, too, and stopped himself.
“You made him laugh,” she says in the instant that he speaks again.
“Pardon?” he says.
“You did. You made him laugh.”
“I’d like to take you to dinner one night soon, without the uniform.”
She removes the hat and sets it on the bench beside her. “The uniform,” she says.
“Right. Does it make you uneasy?”
“I don’t work tomorrow,” she says.
“I’ve got to finish roughing out the inside of the house, for the partition.”
“Well, there’s Wednesday.”
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“Okay,” he says, and it’s as though she has done the asking. She takes a slow sip of her coffee and realizes that her hand is shaking, that her own unruly emotions are running away with her. She wishes for calm, and for something other than his steady gaze on her.
“Well,” she says.
“Wednesday it is,” he tells her. “Good.”
“I’ll have to let you know for sure,” she says.
“Of course.”
They chat a little about the house on Temporary Road and about Oliver’s slow recovery. He says quietly that she must remember it is all, still, recovery. Each day, right? he says, there’s a little more progress.
Yes. That’s true. She tells him the story of Holly on the roof, how she came to know the two ladies, and how Oliver did, too, separately. They finish the coffee and remain for a spell, relaxing into their talk. It occurs to her that she’s not so shaky inside anymore, that, in fact, she’s enjoying herself. They part with a little surprising embrace, and he shakes his head, remarking, as if he has just now thought of it and it is original with him, that it is a small world indeed. There’s something sidelong about his smile, a kind of self-deprecation: he’s perfectly aware of the familiarity of the observation, and his tone and manner are purely for fun, to amuse her.
Later, at home, the children asleep, she gets a call from Marge, whose distance, since her departure, has only increased with time. Marge wants to talk about aspects of her pregnancy and her dissatisfaction with life in her mother’s house. She wants news of her husband the champion asshole. Alison has no news. Or, rather, she has no news that she wishes to report. Oliver’s recovering, yes, there have been minor setbacks. She’s getting along, she tells her friend, who seems not to be listening, really. It’s as if Marge is only waiting for a silence, a polite space in which to insert her next observation about life on the Great Plains, in a small house with her mother and stepfather. Her stepfather, Marge says, is embarrassed about the pregnancy and is making an effort not to show his embarrassment. The whole thing is exhausting. “But really,” Marge t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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says. “You can tell me. Greg’s come over, hasn’t he? He’s hitting on you, right? You can tell me. He said stuff to me last time we talked. How he might be dating a cop before long. The bastard.”
“I haven’t seen him in a while,” Alison says. “I think he might’ve gone north.”
“Well, come on. Tell me how you’ve been.”
“I’m fine. Really.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I’m fine,” Alison says.
“Well, I’m sick of this pregnancy and I smoked twelve cigarettes tonight and had four glasses of wine.”
“Christ sakes, girl.”
After a little space, Marge says, “You remember our chardonnay night?”
“Are you drinking now?” Alison asks.
“I’m drinking now.”<
br />
“Marge.”
“You try it out here in the house of the perpetually shitty.”
“I have to go now.”
“Are we still friends?” Marge wants to know.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re mad at me.”
“I miss you, that’s all—miss hearing from you.”
“Do you love me?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll try to call more often.”
“Just call back now and then.”
“I will. You’re all right, though.”
“Yes,” Alison says. “I’m all right.”
“Because that’s the important thing.”
“I am,” Alison tells her. “I’m fine. Really.”
Yet, after they hang up, she sits crying by the telephone, holding a handkerchief in one hand and a book in the other.
Finally, she turns the lights off in the living room and makes her way to bed. Lying awake, she imagines that she and Stanley begin to 254
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see each other as a couple. It’s clear enough that this is what he wants.
She wants it, too. She admits this to herself in the same moment that she feels troubled by all the effort it will involve, the working out of schedules, the money, the two lives, the children, Oliver and what he will require—may require—with this stroke, her own inconsistencies, her own need, and whatever Stanley’s needs and insecurities might be—
all that. She doesn’t allow herself to think about it more. Her own life seems so solidly fixed around her. She sits up, turns the light on by the bed, begins reading about the geological shifts of the centuries—and falls asleep. She dreams that she and Teddy and the children are together somewhere far away—the vacation they never took. They’re all standing at the edge of a wide, beautiful canyon, very green, not stony, like the Grand Canyon, but green, verdurous, a canyon of brilliant plant life, lush vegetation, leaves the size of flags, all waving in a slow wind, wild growth unlike anything on earth. They stand there, and nothing happens, and she senses the strangeness of it, turning to look at Teddy.
Then she stirs out of the dream with a fright, realizing that she has been asleep for more than an hour. How strange her own mind is. She turns the light out, settles under the blanket, and listens to the little sleep sounds Kalie makes, and then becomes aware that the child has crawled into the bed with her. Reaching for her, Alison snuggles close, and abruptly her mind presents her with the most vivid image of the scene in the middle of the highway, the man lying there and the medics working on him. She attempts to turn this off, concentrating on the child’s soft shoulder, the little sighing breaths.
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