The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “There should be names here.” I put a forefinger on one of the humps. It really does look like a wheel; I am not good at drawing. “And sometimes carvings.”

  She points to Archie. “Is this a dog?”

  “My cat.”

  “I like his tail.”

  She’s no longer drawing; she’s just watching me.

  I flip to a fresh page in the tablet, choose colors for the big window over the doorway: red the color of cherry juice, bright orange, robin’s-egg blue. When that is finished I pick up the gray crayon—Timber Wolf—again and fill in the stonework, peeling away the label as I need to. When I am done, the crayon is mostly gone, and the label says only olf.

  “What is that big building? Is that your school?”

  “My church,” I say, and as I say those words, I smell the cold air inside the thick walls, just one breath; by the next inhale it’s gone.

  “Very nice,” she says, peering through the glasses perched halfway down her nose.

  I have colored so thickly in places that the crayon has left waxy crumbs scattered across the paper. I touch one of them, roll it under my fingertip. The crayons lying beside the paper are Cerise and Sunglow. The robin’s-egg blue is Robin’s Egg Blue.

  “These crayon names are stupid,” I say. “This is red, and this is orange.”

  “I suppose the people who own the company that makes the crayons thought it would be fun to use different names. Does it bother you?”

  “Renaming something doesn’t change it.”

  “We need to talk about something. Okay?” Her voice is serious, says, We’re done talking about crayons. “Do you remember coming here?”

  I nod.

  “Your mom was hurt.”

  She waits; she seems to want me to say something.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “I know it may be hard to talk about what happened.” She looks me straight in the eyes, no blinking now. “It was a really confusing day, wasn’t it.” I nod again. “You’ve told me that you don’t remember anything. But that may not be forever. The memories may start to come back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Will you make me a promise?” She goes on without waiting for an answer. “Will you tell me if you do remember anything? Even just a little bit, like a color or a sound or a smell. Even something really small can help.”

  That lingers in the air, begging me to say, Help what?

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I know,” says Miss Meredith. “But if you do. It’s really, really important.” She takes my silence as agreement. “Okay.” Like we’ve settled something. “Now, do you have any questions for me?”

  No one has asked me that yet. I think for a minute. So many questions crowding up like feeding fish. I choose the nearest one.

  “Are there any more books?” I ask.

  “Excuse me?”

  “All the books here are for babies. Are there other books?”

  “Not here,” she says, after a pause. “There’s a public library a few blocks away. Maybe one of the aides can take you.”

  Like a kick from inside, a singsong chant goes through me: What do you say? A familiar voice, but whose?

  “Thank you,” I tell Miss Meredith. “Thank you very much.”

  * * *

  I OVERHEAR HER talking in her office later that day, when she doesn’t know I’m in the hall. She must be on the telephone, because she talks and waits and then talks some more, and I don’t hear anyone else.

  “He hasn’t said a thing about her,” she says. Her voice isn’t as soft and slow as it usually is. “Not one word. It’s been a week.” Pause. “No, it’s not that. He talks. Not much, I’ll grant you, but he isn’t mute. I haven’t gotten him to put together one coherent memory. You’ll see on the video. He volunteers nothing.” She gives a little laugh, but it doesn’t sound happy. “Oh, except that he wants to be called Leo, and he wants to go to the library.” That’s when I know she’s talking about me. After a pause: “Leo. I don’t know. We have his birth certificate. He’s definitely Ben.” Another pause. “Nope. None. Dad’s Donor Number Whatever and Mom was an only child, no living parents. Who does that? Who brings a child alone into the world like that?” Pause. “Yeah, well. Either he was a sociopath before it happened or he’s completely dissociated because of the trauma. Anyway, we’re making zero progress and he can’t stay here forever.” She stops talking for so long that I think maybe she’s hung up, but then she says, “I know, but we have no choice. All right. All right. You have a crack at him then.” She has a getting-off-the-phone voice and I slip back down the hall to the dayroom as quietly as I can. When she looks in there a few minutes later, I’m frowning over a jigsaw puzzle with Missy, as if I have been working on it with her all along.

  * * *

  IT’S MUDDY, AND hot, and there are bugs crawling on my face. They swarm there in a paste of blood and sweat. That’s the worst part, almost—not being able to wipe my face. They’re stinging me, but with my hands bound I can’t shoo them. I can only shake my head, and that does nothing.

  I wake up shaking my head, and there’s a moment where I’m not sure where I am. My cheeks and forehead sting, and I rub my hands over them hard: nothing there. Slowly the shapes of the room pull out of the darkness and I recognize the hospital. I can feel that I’m not alone, though—there’s someone else here. I hold my breath; do I hear breathing? My heart is still thumping and I half think my pursuers have come out of the dream with me.

  “What’s wrong?” Tiny, squeaky, the voice comes from near the door. A figure creeps forward; light from the window falls across its face. Missy. Her forehead glows white below the haystack of her hair.

  “Bad dream,” I say.

  “Was it the rope monster?” she whispers.

  “I was lost. And bugs were biting me.”

  She nods, stands chewing her lips. It’s my bad dream, but she looks scared. Maybe her own nightmare brought her in here.

  “Come up,” I say, and move over a little on the bed. Not that she needs much room: she’s so light that when she climbs up the mattress hardly dips. “I’ll fix your hair.”

  I use the plastic hospital comb from the drawer. It’ll snap if I try to pull it through any of the tangles, so I hold one of the knots in my hand and tease at the bottom of it, bit by bit, with the teeth.

  “I used to comb my sister’s hair,” I tell her, and then there’s a full sunny flash of memory: scraping Sally’s blond hair into ponytails, twisting the elastic. When was that? I can see the speckled kitchen floor and her feet swinging, a mosquito bite on her shoulder. And then it’s gone.

  Missy’s head drops forward and jerks back, then drops forward again and stays there; she’s fallen asleep. I put the comb onto the table beside the bed.

  “I’m awake,” she mumbles.

  “It’s okay.” I pat the pillow and she puts her still mostly snarled head there. I sit up against the wall and pull the blanket over her, causing a warm puff of pee smell to rise up. She curls up, her back to me, bending her knees to meet her elbows; the sound of her thumbsucking tails off as she falls back asleep.

  My feet still ache from my dream; I remember tight, hurting boots and walking. Walking where? I push the memory of the dream away, but with a sense that it won’t help much. It’s like poking a feather back into a pillow and seeing the tiny hole it leaves, knowing another will work its way through soon enough.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  Clare

  WHEN I HEARD THE NOISES beyond the wall, I was edging a plot near the middle of the cemetery, and at first I didn’t pay any attention. The boys from the school next door occasionally took their amusement by paying the cemetery surreptitious visits. There weren’t any of the typical country diversions to draw them: no water to fish or swim in, apart from a small swampy pond that shrank to a puddle in a dry spell, and it was a couple of miles down the hill to the nearest store, in the tiny town of Waite. It was the mid-1950s
, and the interstate not yet put in; we were up in the rural northwestern corner of the state, and most of the roads were dirt or gravel with farms strung skimpily along the miles. Only a few hard-topped two-lane roads swung through on their way north to Massachusetts or west into Connecticut. There was nothing near the school grounds but me, and uphill a tangled half acre of berries; the rest was farmland.

  I don’t think they have anything like St. William’s Priory School now. It was run by monks, and was more of a reform school than an orphanage. There wasn’t the same concept of childhood then as there is now, no parental or societal outrage to act as a check on institutional grimness. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that these children were unwanted for a reason; they were treated a bit like criminals, uniformed and regimented and harshly corrected, schooled and churched and put to work to learn a proper trade.

  The crops grown in St. William’s fields fed the boys and the brothers, but the lion’s share went to market for sale. There was also a laundry service, started in the late forties to replace the forge, after the wartime boom was over and it became clear to the monks that the motor had more or less permanently replaced the horse. The laundry serviced the hotels and restaurants in Providence, at rates cheaper than anyone else could match. A van brought bales of linen up the hill each afternoon, and shuttled clean ones down just after dawn. The boys worked the fields and the factory machines.

  I’d seen a stealthy party of boys earlier that day, climbing the hill. They didn’t officially have free time, so they had to be shirking some duty to be there. It was late for berries, and the hot rainless spell we’d been having would have cooked any remaining fruit on the bushes, so I knew the boys would find their way back downhill soon enough. When they reappeared, sneaking behind the low stone wall like commandos, I ignored them, working my edger around the pitted flank of a headstone without looking up. In the twenty years I’d been at Roscommon, these visits had never amounted to more than a puppet show of heads over the wall and maybe some catcalls.

  I was edging the Dolans, a cozy family of five who had been carried off by influenza during the Great War. As I peeled away the beard of weeds left behind by the latest mowing, the engraved numbers emerged: 1918 . . . 1918 . . . 1918 . . . 1918 . . . 1918—a sad litany. The infant first, and then the two-year-old. The father had held out longest, watching his wife sicken and die, hoping against hope for the five-year-old, George. How he must have despaired when the little boy began his rusty coughing. The Great War had been less harrowing in some ways than the influenza—the war stayed in Europe, while the influenza came to us at home, a scourge like the plagues in Exodus, the frogs dropping from the sky, the rain of blood, the Angel of Death. Only it wasn’t just the firstborn sons this angel took; it was all the sons, all the daughters, and their parents too.

  I wasn’t prepared for the apple that struck Cathleen Dolan. Mushy fruit that must have been last year’s, wintered over in a cool St. William’s cellar. This year’s apples were still in midswell on the tree, and would have been hard as baseballs. I looked up to see four heads jerking out of sight behind the wall.

  I sighed; I would have to scrub the headstone right away, before the sun cooked the fragrant bits of apple into a brown cement that would be tenacious as a barnacle. I went across the cemetery, through the gate, and up the path to the house. As I came back down into the cemetery with a scrub brush and a bucket of pump water, I expected that the boys would be gone. But as I knelt before Cathleen and dipped the brush into the water, another apple struck me on the forearm, bruising the muscle.

  I scrubbed Cathleen’s stone quickly, reckoning my options. Chasing the boys would likely only make them scatter, and they’d be able to pelt me from all sides. It might be most prudent to sacrifice the afternoon’s work, go back up to the house, let the boys wander away. But something in me balked at giving these hooligans sway over my day’s plan. I rose to my feet and looked around, pantomiming annoyed confusion, turned in a circle and stared in the wrong direction, lifting a hand to shade my eyes. An eruption of giggling from behind the wall while I placed the edger against Seamus Dolan’s headstone and stepped on the blade, forcing it into the sod. I removed and replaced the blade at an angle, stepping again so that the two cuts met and a wedge of earth came away from the headstone. The same movements I had made countless times that day already, except that now each time I lifted the metal crescent I swung it over the bucket of water, dropping its burden there instead of into the wheelbarrow.

  There was a short interval filled with scrambling noises, the boys moving along behind the wall, and then murmurs of conference coming from a new spot. Keeping my head down, I heard: it’s your turn, Leo, go on, and then an exasperated, coward.

  Another missile struck me square in the back, driving a sticky wetness through the layers of cloth. I looked up, making a dramatic show of looking all around, this time stomping a few steps toward the wall, a ploy to keep them in hiding while I tiptoed back toward the Dolans. I could almost feel the boys’ exhilaration, their heartbeats racing with delighted panic as they duck-walked to another ambush point. I propped the edger against a headstone and took up the bucket.

  I had to be quick now. Had they gone left or right? I chose left and went that way, running on the balls of my feet, holding the bucket full of muddy, weedy water with a stiff arm, to minimize sloshing. Since the wall was only three feet high, they were obvious to me, their knees and feet showing while they sat with their backs to the stone. There was a small pile of apples next to their feet, and a deflated canvas bag. They were arguing in hisses. You go. No. It’s your turn. Three pairs of legs right in a row, grouped together, and another pair a little apart. Leo, look. What’s she doing? I lifted the bucket, and just as I did, the boy sitting apart from the others leaned forward and twisted his trunk, putting one hand on the ground and one on the wall and shifting his weight, preparing to peek over the wall. He looked up, and our eyes met.

  We looked at one another in a strange, timeless moment. Me with the bucket upraised, him crouched on the ground with his eyes lifted and wide. I expected him to squeak some alarm, to kick his legs out and crabwalk a retreat from the wall, but he made no sound or motion. He kept his light brown eyes on mine without changing expression.

  Is she looking? hissed one of the other boys. Dummy, and a foot kicked out to get his attention. My co-conspirator said nothing. Do you see her? What’s she doing? just as the bucket’s contents came down over them, a thick brown slurry now, the wedges of sod having married with the water. It was a perfect surprise: one of the boys even looked up, mouth open, and caught a choking swallow. They all sprang to their feet, coughing and shaking their heads, clawing their fingers to clear the mud from their cheeks and eyes. Bitch, they spat, and Jesus Christ. One of them had the courage to scrape a handful from the front of his tunic and toss it across the distance between us. I watched it fall harmlessly at my feet, then looked up again. That small movement frightened them: like a covey of startled birds they burst away, making a clumsy rush toward St. William’s Wood, stepping on twigs and stumbling, cursing and spitting, disappearing among the trees.

  The smallest boy had not moved. He was still crouching there with the wall between us; it put me in mind of a begging animal. I didn’t move either, and after a few more moments he rose to his feet. His eyes held nothing: no satisfaction or amusement or guilt. Then he turned and ran off in the direction the others had gone. I stood there with the empty bucket swinging from one hand, listening to their fading calls. Leo, you son of a bitch. Leo, you’re gonna pay for this.

  I kept the apples. They made a fine sauce.

  * * *

  I LOVE THIS dream, the summer of it, the pure nostalgia of youth and my capable, limber body, not yet even forty years old. I usually awaken from this reverie happy. But this time the dream ends abruptly, and when I check the bedside clock it’s the middle of the night. It takes me some time to fall back into a restless sleep. Perhaps I can blame some lingerin
g effect of that green pill, or Gloria’s loud television detective programs, for injecting a sinister element into my sleep; whatever the cause, after I rise in the morning the dream nags me all day, a wound that won’t close.

  Leo’s face hangs before me, accusing: you’ve forgotten me. I shake my head: never. It’s like I never lived at all. Newly urgent although deeply past, Leo’s lostness tugs at me. He’s right. When I’m gone, Leo will be erased. As though he’d never been. I will sink out of memory myself, but I’ve chosen that; is it fair to take him with me?

  * * *

  IT TAKES ME two days of arguing with myself, but I make up my mind, and when the next evening’s dinner bell goes, I am ready. I wait inside my room, hungry and attentive, listening to the sounds from next door. She’s taking a long time. I hear a door open, but it’s a false alarm, just a cupboard. At last I hear the click of her room door, and the whirrr moving into the hall. I watch the long hand on my big-numbered clock. Two minutes to get down the hall and two more to cross the large common room. After four ticks of the minute hand, like a sprinter exploding out of the blocks I exit my own room and follow in Gloria’s wake.

  I’ve timed it well: when I get to the dining room, Gloria is just rolling herself up to a small table occupied by the married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Barlow.

  We get couples at Oak Haven from time to time. They are of three basic varieties: ones in which the men are ancient and crumbling while their wives are still bright-eyed; ones in which the wives are direly ill and the husbands are comparatively healthy; and others in which both spouses are of roughly equal disability. The first type tend to go everywhere together, the wife a tugboat for the sinking vessel of her spouse; the second type usually have separate rooms, the ailing wife cared for intensively by staff while the husband lives a bachelor life, participating in activities solo; the third type clings together, eating in their quarters and venturing out only as a twosome. The Barlows are of the crumbling-husband type.