Limetown

by Cote Smith

  Through the receiver, Emile heard Moyer take a long drag.

  “Tell me,” Emile said.

  But Moyer refused. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am.”

  * * *

  Emile sped to the hospital only to be denied. “It’s the middle of the night,” the nurse on duty said. “Visiting hours are ov”—he pushed past her and tried the locked door. “Sir,” she said. “I can’t buzz you in.” Emile kicked the door. The nurse threatened to call security. Emile ran down the hall, down the hospital stairs, and out the emergency exit. He would drive to his brother’s house, drag him out of bed, and back to the hospital if he had to. But as he was running out, Jacob was running in, and the two nearly collided. “You’re here,” Jacob said. “Good.” He rushed upstairs, down a different hall and into the maternity ward, where a different nurse was waiting with an open hand that she put on Jacob’s shoulder.

  Alison had gone into labor. The nurse guided him through a set of doors, and no one protested when Emile followed. A doctor met them in Intensive Care. He explained that Alison’s platelet count was low and they would have to take precautions, though neither Emile nor Jacob was really listening to him. Jacob looked past the doctor and into Alison’s room. Emile listened to his brother, his racing thoughts.

  “Can we see her?” Jacob asked.

  The doctor looked at Emile.

  “He’s my brother. I need him here.”

  “I understand, but—”

  “Good,” Jacob said, and pushed past the doctor and into Alison’s room. Another nurse stood sentry bedside. “Allie,” Jacob said, and in that moment, even before the nurse moved, Emile knew. How had he missed it? The way his brother felt. That buzzing feeling, electric but fleeting, as if he had a thing so good, so far beyond what he deserved, that he wouldn’t blame the world for taking it away. How did Emile not recognize that which he had experienced himself, if only briefly?

  “Allie, this is my brother. Emile.”

  “Hi.” Claire didn’t feign surprise when she saw Emile’s face. She had known. She must have known the whole time. Which made everything so much worse.

  The nurse finished taking Claire’s vitals, said she would be back in a few minutes to check on everybody. “Honey,” Claire said. “I forgot to ask her. Will you get me some ice chips? There’s a machine down the hall.”

  “Of course,” Jacob said. “Emile, you watch her for me, okay?”

  Jacob left, and for the first time in six years, Claire and Emile were alone together. What he wouldn’t give to read her mind, to make sense of it all. But he’d never been able to before. Instead, he had to rely on what she said, which, he realized, he could never trust again.

  “I know, I know,” Claire said. “Perfect timing, by the way.” She tried to sit up, but something seized inside her. She groaned as a contraction tore through her body. “Emile. Help.” She needed to stand, she explained, to walk through the pain. Emile pulled her up, close to him. “The window.”

  He walked her over and pulled back the curtain, revealing the construction site for a new, better maternity ward.

  “God,” Claire said, in between clenched breaths, “what a terrible view.”

  Emile held her as she waited for the contraction to pass.

  “This isn’t fun anymore,” Claire said, and Emile helped her back to the hospital bed. He looked at his hands, holding this body, supporting it. “I messed up,” Claire said. She reclined and closed her eyes for a long minute. Emile took the opportunity to study her face, to note how it had changed with time and pregnancy. “Hey. Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” Emile said.

  “You’re upset. You want to yell at me, but you can’t. Because I could die. That makes you even madder.”

  Another contraction ripped through her.

  “Shit,” she said. Her face scrunched with pain. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll make you another deal. If I live, you can kill me. How about that?”

  “Don’t act like this is a joke,” Emile said. “That’s not fair.”

  Claire opened one eye, taking a peek to see if the pain was gone. “Listen. Your brother will be back soon. Do you really want to break his heart right now?”

  Emile heard Jacob’s voice echo down the hallway. He was talking to one of the nurses, explaining that he had to go down a floor because the maternity wing’s ice machine wasn’t working. “How long have you been lying to him?” Emile asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters. I waited for you.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It could’ve been.”

  “Jesus,” Claire said. She pushed herself up so she could look at Emile fully. “We spent a few nights together a million years ago. And look at me now. Look at my legs.” She pulled up her hospital gown, revealing a smattering of bloody dots, a red legion crawling up her calves. “You see this? They don’t know what it is. No one knows—”

  Emile saw the fear in her face. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “You always end up okay.”

  It was the wrong and right thing to say. “You don’t know that,” Claire said. “No one knows that.” She put her hands on her stomach, her fingers spread wide like a safety net. “I haven’t felt her kick in days. The doctors say it’s normal, but I don’t know. God. Ever since I found out, everything is a worry.”

  “Her?”

  Claire looked down at her body, then at Emile. “Can I ask you something?” she asked. “Can you hear her?”

  “That’s not how it works,” Emile said.

  “Have you ever tried?”

  He had not.

  “Try,” Claire said.

  She spoke in a way that made him momentarily forget why he was there, why he needed to be angry. Emile closed his eyes. He willed the world to disappear. Jacob’s voice was outside the room now, talking to the doctor. Were there any updates? There were no updates. There was nothing positive coming out of the doctor’s mouth.

  Emile pushed it all away, the sounds of their voices, the anonymous beeping of some tedious machine. He kept his eyes shut, closed as hard as he could. He held his breath and dove deep beneath the ocean. Deeper still, until an immense pressure built in his chest, squeezing him tighter and tighter until he couldn’t breathe.

  “Well?” Claire said. “Anything?”

  He opened his eyes. He’d heard nothing. From Claire, from what was inside her. All he saw was worry, the fear in her face, which had not been immune to time, but had not surrendered its beauty either.

  * * *

  If he was a good brother, he would’ve stayed at the hospital. He would’ve stood by Jacob’s side. Instead he left. He drove out to Lost 80 and this time he was the guy with the beer. He took a six-pack past the leaning teens and sat under his tree. He drank can after can until all that remained were six rings of plastic that he wore on his wrists like handcuffs. Moyer found him sometime later. He spread a handkerchief on the ground and sat down in the dirt next to Emile.

  He lit a cigarette. “How was the family reunion?”

  “I didn’t stay.”

  “That’s a shame,” Moyer said. He leaned against the tree. He sighed. “I miss Tracey,” he said, and there was a long moment in which neither of them spoke. If it were summer, crickets and frogs would have chimed in, out of politeness.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Emile finally said, if only to get the repeating thought out of his head.

  “Me either,” Moyer said. “Part of me wants to give up, you know. Tell Dr. Totem you’re a boat without a buoy.”

  “An anchor?”

  “No. You’ve got a million things tying you down, good and bad, even if you won’t admit it. Your problem, mate, is you don’t know where you want to go. You’re floating in the middle, clueless which way is the shore.”

  Emile frowned. “You’re much more eloquent when you’re sad.”

  Moyer ashed into one of Emile’s empties. “There are things I can tell you,
you know, things that Dr. Totem doesn’t want me to share, but that might help you make up your mind.”

  Emile turned to Moyer, whose face remained hidden in the dark. “Why would you do that?”

  Moyer tapped out another cigarette. In a few hours the sun would begin to rise, and if Emile stayed with Moyer long enough, he might finally see his face in the light of day.

  “I told you,” Moyer said. “I miss Tracey. With or without you, I want to go home.”

  * * *

  Here was what Moyer knew: the Eldridge never lost track of Claire, despite her detours, her snaking around the country. Where did she go? Eventually, to her mother. She had not lied to Emile. Her mother lived in an assisted living center in Claire’s hometown. This, in southeastern California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Emile never made it that far west in his search for Jacob, but he pictured the stark nothingness of Mars in the movie he and Claire had watched together.

  They were the ones who met her at the door. They told her that her mother had gotten worse, her depression—that’s what they called her gift—more severe. She pushed past them and into the facility, where she found her mother sitting alone in her room, staring out the window at the desert and reciting her dreams. They covered the exits, and when Claire came out—pale, shaken—they reminded her that she had not fulfilled the terms of their deal. That it was contingent upon Claire staying. They would pay for her mother’s care if and only if Claire saw the experiments through. “I don’t know where he is,” she said. “We do,” they said. “He’s in Boise, waiting for you. But it’s not where he is that’s the issue; it’s where we want him to be. We need him back, before it’s too late.” “So grab him,” she said. “Lock him up.” “We tried that,” they said. “That was a mistake. Shortsighted. What we want is longevity. We want him to feel like he’s home.”

  “A deal’s a deal,” they said, and they leaned in when they said this, to drive their point home. “He won’t come alone,” she said. “He needs more than me.” They looked at her skeptically, but eventually understood. Home meant Jacob. “It’ll take time,” she said. “And even then, he’ll need some convincing.”

  Emile expected the story to end there, for Moyer to say, “See, look how devious she is.” But he continued.

  They told her where Jacob was, how he’d tried college but ended up back where he started. She’d never been to Kansas, never been east of Archer Park. She found Jacob washing dishes in a restaurant downtown. After his shift, she followed him to an unfurnished basement he rented from an old man whose favorite pastime was yelling at the television. All these things she reported to them. What she did not tell them then (though she would later, after her mother died, when she screamed into the phone, standing in the apartment she shared with Jacob, who at her request had run out to buy some mint chocolate chip ice cream, a specific craving she could not explain, that they had nothing on her anymore. They had nothing because she had nothing. Though that would change a week later, after the doctor congratulated her. And when they talked to her next, they said, See, there’s always something that can be taken away.), what she knew right away when she saw Jacob that first night, slinking from job to home to job again, was that what they wanted from her was impossible. Here was a man who had given up on doing anything great with his life. Who’d once, in the naivety of youth, dreamed far into the future, but now settled for a quiet existence. More importantly, here was someone who lost a mother he couldn’t admit he longed for, and failed a brother he couldn’t admit he’d wronged. He would never persuade Emile, or anyone else he loved, to do anything they didn’t want to do or go anywhere they didn’t want to go. That was the man she ended up choosing, a man whose love wasn’t predicated on getting anything in return. A man who would always be there, no matter where she went or what impulses she followed.

  “Does that help?” Moyer asked. He’d finished his cigarette and sat on his hands, fighting the urge to light another.

  “She chose him,” Emile said, in disbelief.

  Moyer stood up, brushed the leaves and dirt off his linen pants. “In your brother’s defense, he doesn’t know anything about her. He thinks her mother left her that house when she died. That she’s just a biology major, a late bloomer at the local uni. Can you believe that?”

  Emile couldn’t. He couldn’t believe any of it.

  “Anyway, the rest you’ll have to get from them. Or her, I suppose, unless you’re in the business of exposing secrets and ruining lives. It’s your decision, ultimately, but please make it quick. Women like Tracey, they won’t wait around forever.”

  * * *

  Emile returned to the hospital. He needed to talk to Claire alone.

  He felt a leap of panic when a different nurse—how many were there?—refused to buzz him in. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we don’t have anyone by that name.”

  “I was just here,” he said. “Claire was just here.” It took him a moment to realize what he’d said, what he’d called her. He was lucky Jacob wasn’t around.

  The room was dark, quiet. Jacob slept in a chair, swaddled by a hospital blanket. Claire was awake, though she looked exhausted, her face pale and eyes resigned. She breathed deeply. “It was just a virus,” she said. “Some mono variation. That’s what was causing my blood to not clot. They figured it out right before the real labor began. Thankfully giving birth is a long, excruciating process. Gave time for the drugs to work.”

  Emile looked around the room. He told himself not to worry, to remember why he came here. But he saw no sign of a baby, other than an empty crib pushed against the wall.

  “She’s getting shots,” Claire said, “or sleeping. I don’t know. I forget what they said. I may or may not have accepted every painkiller ever invented.”

  “But you’re okay.”

  “I’m great.”

  “And she’s okay?”

  Claire smiled. “She’s perfect.” Jacob stirred in his chair. “Come here,” Claire said.

  He sat on her bed, but wouldn’t look at her. She reached for his hand, her fingers landing on his only for a moment before there was a knock at the door. The nurse came in, cradling a bundle to her chest. She gave the bundle to Claire.

  “She should be ready to eat,” the nurse said before leaving.

  Emile turned and faced the wall while the baby fed. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted so badly to be angry. All this time, he had been waiting for Claire, looking for Jacob, and they had found each other instead. And now they had a baby—a family. The time he spent with Claire felt insignificant, by comparison. Maybe what he thought he felt, what he’d carried with him all these years, wasn’t what he thought it was. How would he know? He was so young.

  “Would you like to hold her?” Claire said.

  Emile shook his head no, but his hands reached for the bundle. He held the little heater to his chest. She had already fallen back asleep, her tiny eyelids twitching with dreams.

  “What do you think?” Claire said. “Me or him?”

  “What?”

  “Who does she look like? I can’t tell.”

  Emile studied the bundle’s face. You, he wanted to say. She is you Maybe not every feature, maybe she has Jacob’s nose, but everything she adds up to, the sum of her parts, is you.

  A few minutes later the nurse returned and took the baby from Emile. He rubbed his arms where he’d held her. Already they grew cold.

  “Do you have a name?” the nurse asked.

  Claire looked out the window at the terrible view and smiled.

  “Lia,” she said. “After my mother.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lia

  The morning after Lia read the dead letter from Emile to her mother, she waited downstairs in the living room. She left the photo of her mother and Emile taped to her mother’s bathroom mirror, where she would be sure to see it. When her mother finally came downstairs, she was already fully dressed. She walked straight up to Lia, tossed the photo in her lap, and sa
id, “Wait until your father’s gone.”

  After her father left for work they sat out on the screened porch. The sky was its usual gray, the weather chilly enough for a sweater. Lia zipped up her gray hoodie and wrapped herself in Emile’s scarf, which had suddenly taken on a different meaning.

  “What would you like to know?” her mother said.

  Lia looked into her mother’s dark eyes and wondered whom she was talking to. Alison, or Claire. “Everything,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

  * * *

  Alison was elusive, apologetic, and when Lia’s questions nudged the story down an undesirable path, Claire took the wheel. Alison was from a small California town just outside the Kelso Dunes in the Mojave Desert. Her father left when Alison was little, six or seven; her mother was diagnosed with psychotic depression shortly after. That’s when Claire was born. In the beginning, out of necessity.

  In high school, when Alison’s grades began to drop, she was called into the counselor’s office. By this time, she would only answer to Claire. She sat crooked in a chair, one leg hanging over the armrest, listening to the counselor go on and on. “What you’re going through is normal,” the counselor said. “It’s a phase, this name change of yours. It’s an expression of your flexible self. But know this. What you call yourself doesn’t really matter. There is no running away. No name will change who you are, or who you will eventually come to be.”

  “Do you ever dream, Lia?” Lia’s mother asked her. “No. About the future.”

  Her mother explained that her dreams started when she was Lia’s age. Younger actually. She saw little things at first, bursts of minutiae: a pair of shoes strung on a power line, which she walked under the next day; a dead skunk in the middle of the road that she found a week later. Gradually the dreams grew longer, more vivid, and the things she saw in them more significant. “I remember this one time—it was two nights before a classmate broke her arm in a car accident. I saw the color of the cast. I saw my signature and what I wrote below: Told you so.” Her mother blew on her mug of coffee. “I prayed they would go away.” When they didn’t, she broke down and told her mother, expecting skepticism. Instead, she put her hand on her shoulder, told her the best thing to do was embrace it. Dreaming is seeing, she said.