The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  I quickly opened the flaps of the coat to check on Bradley. I had been holding him awfully tightly. I took just a second to see that he was breathing, although sodden and quiet, and hitched him up in order to resettle him against my body. A terrible mistake, a terrible, terrible mistake. In that moment of shifting, that small movement, I loosened my grip on him.

  And then. The wind roared up like it had been waiting. It took his little wet body from my arms. My clumsy hands closed a moment too late onto empty air. Like the umbrella, the pram hood, like all the objects that had been tossed and dancing along above my head during the journey, my baby was snatched up, torn away in the space of a heartbeat, leaving me with my arms still cradled, still feeling his weight there, the warm spot against my breastbone suddenly gone cold. I turned my head up to the slanting rain.

  Something came out of nowhere and slammed into me, and all was black.

  * * *

  I AWOKE IN a dark room filled with what seemed to be sleeping people. Looking back, I know that they were actually dead, or in the process of dying, and someone must have carried me there with others found after the storm. There was probably moaning and breathing around me, but I don’t recall it. All I knew was that it was cold and dark, and that Bradley wasn’t with me.

  My limbs were stiff and my clothing wet and heavy. With some difficulty I got down off the hard surface I was lying on, a table of some sort, and made my way toward a faint light at one end of the room.

  The light, it turned out, was spilling from the crack beneath a door at the top of a flight of stairs. I took hold of the stair rail and stepped up. The light fell across my body, and looking down, I saw my injury for the first time. You couldn’t blame whoever it was who’d brought me to that room for thinking I was beyond saving, with the great big piece of wood sticking out of my chest, and me cold as the water I’d been floating in. No one could survive such a wound, but miraculously, I had. I didn’t feel any wonder about it, not then. Without hesitation, I put both of my hands around the spike, tore it out, and flung it away. It clattered down the stairs, leaving a quarter-sized hole but no pain; I pressed my hand there to staunch the bleeding as I climbed the stairs.

  The door at the top opened onto a long corridor pierced along its length by windows, gray oblongs that told me it was morning. I’d been in that basement all night. I went down the corridor, found a door at the end, and pushed through it to the street.

  I didn’t recognize any landmarks in the devastated scene before me. I turned and looked at the building behind me, read the words carved over the doorway. The Methodist girls’ school; I’d never been inside before, but I knew it from my childhood bedroom window above the bookshop. It was on the other side of the river from home.

  The water still surged in the street knee high, a glittering, tinkling crust of broken glass moving on its surface, banging together with a sound like chimes. Cars were slewed in random patterns, where they’d floated sometime during the night. Houses had emptied into the wind. A lidless porcelain toilet stood beside the crushed remains of a dining room set, one delicate, Queen Anne leg angling away from the heap like the limb of a wounded animal. A tea tray balanced on a louvered section of clapboard, pot and sugar bowl and creamer quite intact. Tree limbs, heavy with leaf, were showered over the landscape. Things fluttered in their boughs: clothing, paper.

  I kept to the middle of the street, as the sidewalks were largely blocked by debris. I retrieved a floating plank and used it to push a path through the glass, sliding the flat pieces apart like ice floes and wading through as quickly as I could before they came banging back together again. Beneath the water, unknown objects bumped up against me like curious fish. A group floating on a makeshift raft pulled up to a broken storefront window, and a fellow hopped off into the building. He passed things out to those waiting, adding to their pile of booty.

  I crossed the bridge that arced up to a dry point in the middle and then turned onto Wickenden Street. This was the lowest point of Providence; it was like a wide bowl full of water. The tops of motorcars, submerged above their windows, were like giant stepping stones, and I used some of them that way, hauling myself up, walking over the metal, then jumping or swimming to the next. A man coming from the opposite direction jumped onto a car just after I did; he grabbed me around the waist to help me steady myself, and then without a word leapt away again, onto the car behind me. When there were no more cars, I swam. There were rats with me in the water, little heads with ears laid back and V-shaped wakes behind. I looked at them without disgust: they were no different from me. They had also somehow survived, and also were heading home.

  I reached a corner and recognized the building that was still standing there: somehow, I had passed the bookshop without knowing it. I turned to look behind me: the whole block was a smash of wood, roof tiles, bricks. No distinction between buildings, just a long mass of wreckage with a chimney poking up here and there. I walked back, against the force that was pulling me toward the church, to the place I had last seen Bradley. Had my mother somehow gotten to safety before the walls came down? The bookshop was a mountain and I scrambled up its slope of splintered boards, stones, tiles. Digging where the kitchen would be, tearing my hands, finding at last a muddy ruffle of apron. The shadow girl turns away before seeing the rest.

  * * *

  WHEN I FINALLY got to the church, I saw that people had been at work there already: the tree that had blocked my path had been sawn apart and moved in pieces to one side. The building front gaped, doorless; some of the stones around the entrance had come out. I turned slowly in a circle, in the place where I had stood that terrible minute, face upturned. I began walking.

  It never occurred to me to go to the apartment I shared with Hugh. I didn’t give a thought to the potential damage there, or to my husband. I suppose I was thinking of the tea set I had seen, that had blown through the air on the tray and come to rest unscathed. A trivial rescue, but still miraculous; why not a miracle for Bradley?

  The air grew warmer as the sun rose above me. I knew these streets well, yet I hardly recognized anything. So many of the buildings were smashed to pieces, or gouged like sandcastles kicked by an enormous foot. I passed people, some in groups working together to lift wreckage into a pile or to shore up a sagging front porch; others wading, as I was, grimly along. We didn’t speak. The silence was overwhelming, like another presence among us.

  The street continued to slope upward; soon the water was just at my calves, and then at my ankles; then it was only in the gutters. I was now on streets I didn’t know. I passed another church, its steeple cracked off and plunged into the earth in front of its narrow entrance; there was a small crowd standing around it, and a man under the cloak of a camera, taking a photograph. Farther along, I saw a car tilted up onto someone’s front lawn, only two of its wheels on the ground, the other two held up by shrubbery. I was listening hard. I heard plenty of crying children and babies, none of them mine. A mother knows the sound her child makes, can distinguish it from among an orphanage of wailing.

  As I continued, the houses became more intact, but I hardly noticed. I scanned the treetops, looked hard at every cluster of humanity I passed. That was the new thought that had come to me while walking: a frail hope that maybe he had been taken in, by someone who found him caught by his little sweater in the branches of a tree. Yes, I can see now that it was ridiculous. I was half-mad, I suppose.

  I finally stopped because I could not walk anymore. I was in a field, very far from where I had started. There were no trees here to have caught Bradley, no people here to have found him. I had been moving mechanically, propelled by an unthinking purpose, and now, my thickened senses returning, I began to doubt. The wind had been so changeable—it could have carried him in any direction. He could be in one of the homes I had passed and left behind. For the first time, I considered the possibility that the wind had dropped him quickly, that he could have been one of those unmoving shapes in the basement of the Met
hodist school. That he might have been on one of the tables beside me in the dark. And that I had left him there.

  * * *

  WHEN I AWOKE again it was bright day and I was in a clean bed in a large room. My legs felt very heavy, and every part of me was howling with pain. I was wearing a man’s plain white nightshirt, the placket partly open. From beneath the fabric, the corner of a bulky bandage peeped out. With effort, I held my arms up before me; they were scratched and swollen.

  “Are you hungry?” asked a man coming over. I didn’t realize at first that he was a monk; I thought he might be a hallucination, maybe even Death, in those robes.

  “Soif,” I said, the French coming to me first. If he was the Devil, if this was Hell, he would pour sand into my throat. But he brought me water and tipped the glass to my lips so I could drink. When I’d had enough, he put the glass by the bedside and went away. He returned carrying a metal basin and took a seat by the bed.

  “Where am I?” I said, in English this time.

  “St. William’s Priory,” said the man. Or boy: I could see now that he was not much older than I was. “I’m Brother Silas.” He took a scroll of bandage from the basin, unrolled a length and cut it, folded it into a thick square.

  “What town?” I said.

  “The nearest town is Waite,” said Silas. Seeing my blank expression, he explained, “Hope County. Where did you come from?”

  “Providence.”

  He looked surprised. “So far on foot?” I nodded. “You just appeared in one of the fields. We didn’t know what had happened to you at first. We didn’t have the storm here.”

  That seemed impossible, that there had been a place in the world outside the storm. “How long have I been here?”

  “A week.” He reached toward my chest, then hesitated. “I have to dress your wounds.”

  I nodded, and lay back.

  “This may hurt a little,” he said.

  He pulled the bandage away quickly, ripping the flesh. A burst of pain and then the warm trickle of blood. Then a strange pulling feeling as he drew more bandage out of the depths of the wound.

  “This goes very deep,” he said, inspecting the place when all of the bandage was out, pressing a clean cloth against it. “It seems to be healing, though. You’re lucky there’s no infection.” Lucky. It hardly hurt; it didn’t feel like part of me at all. He took the cloth away, turned it to find a clean spot, applied pressure again. Then he poured water from a jug into the basin and washed the area gently. His eyes fiercely focused on his hands; my breasts were plainly within view. “We wanted to contact your people,” he said, patting the skin dry and packing new bandage into the wound, smearing the area around it with unguent. His movements were sure; it was clear that he had done this many times while I was sleeping. “But we didn’t know your name.” He finished his work and covered me up again.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m not finished,” he said, and moved down the bed to remove the blankets from my legs. I looked down and saw why they felt so heavy: they were wound with gauze from thigh to ankle like two stiff bolsters. He lifted one foot and started unwinding the bandages. A blaze of pain as the gauze pulled away. A welcome pain, a cleansing pain.

  I laid my head back, and was asleep before he finished.

  * * *

  THOSE DAYS ARE muffled, a long dirge moaning in my memory. I was mute, stony. Sleeping, waking. If I had felt enough to want anything, I might have wanted to be dead. Brother Silas ministered to me every day while I lay like an already dead thing. I allowed him to wash me and feed me and lift me to a chair by the window, where I sat unthinking, unmoving, until he put me back into bed again.

  I was sitting in that chair by the window, my freshly bandaged legs propped up on a little stool with a pillow, when someone new appeared in the doorway. Silas was reading to me from the lives of the saints. Today’s story was of the saint who had burned to live a humble life for Jesus. She’d run away from home, given up all her worldly goods, cut her hair off, worn rough cloth, and lived without money. She’d died happy, telling her followers, Can a heart which possesses the infinite God be truly called poor?

  When the man entered the room, Silas stood and excused himself, leaving the book open on the little table beside me.

  “I’m Prior Washburn.” He was much older than Silas, and shorter, with fine silver hair. He stood the way they all did, his hands clasped before him, his arms swallowed in his sleeves. “Silas tells me you’ve been up and walking.”

  I nodded. I had walked the length of the room the day before for the first time.

  “He also says that you won’t tell him your name,” he said.

  I looked down at the book Silas had left, then out the window.

  “There must be someone looking for you. Someone worrying about you.” He unclasped his hands; in one of them he was holding a folded newspaper. “I have the list of the missing and dead from Providence.” He held out the paper but I did not move to take it. “I’ll read it to you, shall I?”

  He pulled a chair over and read the list of the dead while I looked out the window. He read slowly, watching me. The Sullivans and Cabrinis and LeComptes and Coelhos, all mixed together in a list as they never were in life. Among them, my mother and Michel. My own name. Bradley’s.

  Outside the window, the sky was blue and innocent; the fields rolled out in all directions. I could see figures in one field, and a horse and cart. Harvesting something. I squinted: pumpkins? They were just orange dots from here. It was early for pumpkins. Maybe squash.

  “That’s all?” I said, when Prior Washburn had stopped reading. “No one else?”

  “That’s all.”

  The world turned around me, empty and breathtakingly large. I had no place in it. No warm fragment of home. I floated free. A terrible unwanted freedom, a world too large. But hadn’t I wanted it? And of course I was not quite free: there was the remaining tether of Hugh. That thought was impossible.

  The figures in the field were children, I realized. The landscape swarmed with their industry. We were on a high floor; the window let me see beyond the field and over the tree line, to a little hill in a clearing. There stood a tiny stone house, all alone.

  “What’s that?” I said, and lifted one of my battered hands to point. The prior rose to look.

  “That’s Roscommon. The old cemetery, and the keeper’s house. It used to be in the center of town, long ago when there was a town there.” How could a town just disappear? “The old church used to stand beside it. The cottage is very primitive. No one lives there now.”

  I have no one. I have no place in the world. I didn’t realize that I had spoken aloud until the prior answered me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Tell me their names. I can pray for them.”

  Just like a priest. Next he’d be offering Confession. I couldn’t confess, though; a proper confession requires both contrition and a sincere resolve not to repeat the sin. The sin I was about to commit was one for which I would not feel contrite, and one I planned to commit for as long as possible.

  “God already knows their names,” I said.

  “That He does. A little reminder doesn’t hurt, though.” He smiled. “God knows your name too, but I don’t know what to call you.”

  There was a silence.

  “You can call me Clare.” The saint who had lived in poverty with God.

  He looked at the open book, and out the window again at Roscommon.

  “Fitting,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t fooled.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  * * *

  Lucy

  THE LAST TIME I LOOKED for an apartment, I didn’t really. Joe scoped out all the possibilities and did the first-looks, and I went along for the second pass, viewing the two or three options left after he’d filtered by location, price, amenities. I’d teased him for sounding like a realtor as he drove us from place to place, describing each offering as we pulled up. The wedding-cake Victorian with the to
p-floor apartment featuring huge drafty windows and a spiral staircase to a cupola (no); the modern two-bedroom with a gym in the basement (tempting, but the place was very dark); the second-floor apartment in the funky historical-registry building close to the hospital, with a balcony (yes, despite the iffy neighborhood).

  The coffee shop is quiet, one of those bare-bones establishments that provides good pastries and Wi-Fi and power strips in every outlet; when the doors open, the students flock in and settle with their laptops and books. The quiet conversation of two young women at a nearby table floats to me, the vocabulary catching my involuntary attention: dysplasia, angiomyolipoma. They’re students, medical or possibly nursing, studying the genitourinary system, judging from the terms that trip out in their happy voices. They must be preclinical, from the mispronunciations: he-ma-tur-I-a, cysto-SCO-py, cryptor-CHI-dism.

  The medical academic year runs from July to July, the undergraduate year from August to the end of May. Craigslist in March is a bath of remainders: crumbling South Providence walk-ups and first-floor apartments off the tatty northern end of Hope Street, all alike with their drafty double-hung windows and tiny rooms floored with hardwoods varnished to a sickly yellow gloss, the built-in china hutches wearing so many layers of paint over the hinges that the doors don’t open all the way. I can’t see myself in any of them. Or is it just that I can’t see myself anywhere alone? Until recently, I’d expected my next address would be a home, not another temporary stopover. I can’t keep living in a call room, though.

  “Dr. Cole?” I look up to see a vaguely familiar face. Six feet, close-cropped hair. “It’s you, right?”