I run up the steps as she crosses the street.
* * *
“I WAS HOPING to see you again,” says the library lady. “Something popped into my mind a couple of days after you came in last time. When you get old, your memory can be unpredictable.” She smiles and taps her head. She puts down what she is holding, a newspaper on a long wooden rod, and I follow her to a computer.
“We didn’t dig deeply enough,” she says, typing.
The search results furl down on the screen: the same ones from last time, as far as I can tell.
“See, these all say Ireland,” she says, putting a fingertip on the glass.
“It’s not in a different country,” I say.
“Well, I think you’re right,” she says. “And it occurred to me . . . I’m not an authority on local history by any means, but . . .” She’s paging through the results now, clicking next . . . next . . . next. Finally on page sixteen, she scrolls down and clicks on a block of text. “Could that be it?” she says, standing back.
At first I am not sure what I’m seeing, but then she enlarges the image and there’s the curving road on the hill, the church, the road to town.
“That’s it,” I say.
“I thought so.” Triumphant. “And . . . print,” she says. The printer beside us starts humming, and a paper slowly pushes out. One page, then a second. “Only about twelve miles away,” she says, squaring the pages on the tabletop before handing them to me. “Is this for a school project?”
“Kind of,” I say.
* * *
WHEN I GET outside, I can see Jenessa sitting in the car across the street. The man who’d been leaning against it is inside the car with her. The sun flashes off her hair clip as she turns her head. I look away quickly, as if that will help her not see me. A bus pulls up to the stop, blocking her from view. I walk around the corner.
A few other kids pass me, hands in the straps of their backpacks, walking home from school. They eye me—they know I don’t belong—but they don’t say anything, and no one else notices me. Only a couple of cars go by. After a few blocks, the sidewalk is gone and I’m walking on tired-looking grass filled with glass pieces and cigarette butts. I look at the map. The way I’m supposed to go on the map starts as a thick blue line, but I don’t see a road like that anywhere. I’m going toward the sun, so I know it’s the right direction. There aren’t a lot of street signs, just tall poles where they should go. The buildings are different here, nearly all shops of some kind, with ripply metal roofs and chain fences. There are hardly any houses.
It takes me a while to realize that the blue line from the map must be the big road that’s below the one I’m on. I can look down and see it like a river of moving cars, the waning sunlight winking off them. I can’t possibly walk on that busy road; I’d be spotted in a minute. I’ll stay instead in the tangle of small streets that nestle into the curves of the map’s thick blue line. They’ll get me there. It’ll be smarter to walk after dark; I’ll find a place to hide until then.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
* * *
Lucy
A RED BLOOD CELL LIVES 120 days and then dies, part of the natural senescence happening all over our bodies all the time. Everything about us is constantly dying and regenerating. Even while we sit quietly we are humming with activity, making and remaking ourselves. In 120 days all my blood will be new; not one blood cell that has known my husband will remain. The thought of my fresh, unbetrayed blood comforts me. I can wait 120 days—four months—I can wait that long. And while it’s not complete renewal—we’re more than blood, we’re a panoply of organs, we’re skin and bones and muscles and sinew and nerves and fat and lymph and miles and miles of gut—the solid fact remains that red blood cells live 120 days and then are replaced with brand-new cells. And that seems a good enough place to start.
CHAPTER FORTY
* * *
Clare
BELINDA IS THE ONE TO tell me.
“I’m so sorry, Miss Clare.” She sits down on the bed. “Miss Gloria passed last night.”
“She was doing so well yesterday.” My tears surprise me. I’ve outlived everyone I’ve ever known; I naively supposed I’d outlived my capacity for grief as well.
Belinda pats my hand. “You know it can go like that.”
I do know. Haven’t I seen it many times before? Sudden improvement often is a harbinger of doom. Gloria had seemed so much better yesterday, and I took it as a good sign, a sign that she was getting better. Hope can make a person blind.
“She wanted you to have this.”
A small box about the size of a pound of butter. Beautifully wrapped in paper printed with lilacs and a narrow ridged ribbon curled into a profusion of ringlets.
“Gloria didn’t wrap that,” I said. She would never have had the patience for all that ribbon fussing. She was the lumpy-envelope-plastered-with-tape type of gifter, all substance over style.
“I wrapped it for her,” admits Belinda. “She gave it to me last week. I think she knew her time was coming.”
She had. She’d tried to tell me, but I hadn’t been listening.
“I didn’t say good-bye,” I tell Belinda. My voice cracks on the last word.
“Oh Miss Clare.” Belinda puts her arms around me. She has a scent like clean linen. “You’ll see each other again.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I really do.” She leans over and pulls a tissue from the bedside box, pats it against my cheeks. “She also gave me a message: You’re going or I’ll come back and haunt you. She said you’d know what that means. Are you going somewhere?”
I suppose I am.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
* * *
Leo
THEY WALK SO SOFTLY BEHIND me that I can’t hear them, and I start to wonder if they’ve gone away, if I’m walking blindly on alone. I slow, and immediately there is a poke in my back, jolting me forward. So they are still close behind. I resume walking, straining to see, to hear, but I see only darkness, hear only my own breathing and my heavy boots crashing through the jungle.
We have been walking for hours, ever since they found me and cut me down from the tree my parachute was tangled in. The white silk must have looked like a signal flag. I was dangling and dazed and grateful at first to see them.
I’ve been trying to work my bonds loose while I walk, a slow-motion escape. Pressing outward with my wrists as far as I can, bringing them back together and then putting my hands against my hip, trapping the loops and rolling them just a little higher than they were, just where the wrist starts to widen into forearm. Keeping my movements as subtle as possible, not sure if I’m making any progress at all.
I consider my options. I can’t get far on my own; I don’t know where I am. Without moving my head, just using my eyes, I look up and see that the dark is infinitesimally less dark in patches: sky between treetops. I was always good at climbing. If I could get up high enough, wait for dawn, I could look around and try to get my bearings. I could stand with my feet on a branch, my back against the trunk, motionless until night comes again. Bark on the tree, like the training instructor used to say. Luckily we haven’t dropped chemicals here and there is still foliage to hide me.
Another hard poke: I quicken my pace, although my legs feel like concrete tubes swinging from my hips. I take only a few more steps before I am jerked backward by a hand on my shoulder. So that last poke must have meant Stop.
There is a scraping noise, unmistakable: a Zippo. Tears in my eyes at the friendliness of the sound, or maybe just the sudden light. The jumping flame on the ground frightens me more than anything else so far. It tells me how hopeless this is. If we were close to any ARVN or Americans, they wouldn’t make a fire. There’s a kick at the backs of my knees; my legs buckle and I fall heavily onto one shoulder with an oof, provoking a rough clatter of laughter from the direction of the fire.
They are ignoring me now, crouched around the fire, going through the t
hings they have taken. Eating while they inspect the goods, flicking an occasional item into the flames. They must have found others before they found me: one of them unwraps a small sheaf of GI belts, snaps them to test the fabric, then coils them up again.
They notice me looking; one of them gets up and stands in front of me, blocking my vision. He speaks down at me, a harsh chain of meaningless noises.
“I don’t understand.” My voice is hoarse, clogged.
He speaks again, staccato, imperative. I shake my head.
He bends down, slaps me so that I fall over onto my side again; there’s a sudden pain in one bound wrist. No laughter this time. He crouches beside me, the speech like machine-gun fire. He is so close that his saliva makes wet drops on my cheek; I squeeze my eyes shut.
Now a hand grasps my ear and pulls it away from my head. The new pain brings tears to my eyes but I am almost grateful for the fresh sensation, crying out louder than the dull powerful ache everywhere else. It focuses me: all I am is ear. I am the line where the tender flesh joins my skull, I am nothing but that hot line and the heartbeat shaking my body, and the rasping sound of my own breath.
He is shouting now, jerking my head back and forth by the ear between his fingers, grinding my cheek in the dirt, and eventually I understand. He wants my eyes open. He wants me to watch.
* * *
AND I’M TUMBLING back toward the beginning, wherever that is. I am at the beginning, then before the beginning. The beginning is all around me.
* * *
A SWEEP OF light wakes me, glaring through my eyelids. It’s very cold. Everything is white before the light moves away again and I realize that it was headlights, a car going by. I wait.
When my eyes have adjusted, I emerge from the place I’ve been sleeping—a cardboard box flattened on the ground behind a row of bins—and set off. I may not be able to walk on the blue-line road, but I can walk on the streets beside it and follow it as it curls west. I just need to walk as fast as I can before the sun comes up.
Past parking lots and fences, it’s all pavement here, no grass. A redbrick building with tall dark windows takes up one whole long block. When I get to a big street, I stand outside the cone of streetlight until I’m sure there’s no traffic before I try to cross. I count while I walk, get past a thousand before I lose track, sing every song I know. The alphabet song, “You Are My Sunshine,” then hymns that float to me from somewhere. For all the saints makes a good marching song, and I sing that a few times over, all the verses I can remember, then, A mighty fortress is our God. I have to stop when my throat is dry.
The street I’m on gets winding and narrow, the walls of buildings rising high on either side. Someone unseen coughs and calls to me from the shadows. Hey kid, hey kid c’mere—making chills spread down from my shoulders like a cape. Leave him alone, says another voice.
In the distance is a sign with lights shining on it, a picture of a hamburger and a glass of Coca-Cola. It’s very high; it must be on the roof of a building. It hangs in the dark sky like a promise. The hamburger would be wonderful, but I stare at the glass of Coke, the ice cubes in it. Maybe there’s a machine at the bottom of the sign. No money needed, just reach in and take out a bottle; don’t I remember a machine like that from somewhere? I can almost feel the cool scalloped glass in my hand. Now I’m thinking of the red iron handle of the pump standing in the yard at Roscommon, and now of the drinking fountain in the hospital. I imagine stepping on the metal lever and putting my mouth over the upside-down U of cold water; the thought of it makes my throat hurt with longing. It starts to rain and I put my head back to let it rain into my mouth, but the drops mostly hit my eyes and my cheeks and my forehead, hardly ever my tongue.
It surprises me when the street I’m walking on ends. I stand between the arms of an untidy bush and unfold the map. The rain taps the pages and flutters them in my hands. I look at the wrong place in the dim light for a long time, trying to match it up to anything, before I finally find the corner I’m standing on.
It can’t be, it just can’t. I’ve been walking for hours but I’ve barely gone any distance at all from where I started. I measure with my thumb and forefinger pinched apart: I would have to make this walk another ten times, another twenty times, just to reach the white spur of road that runs from the blue line west toward Roscommon. I can’t do it. I know I can’t do it. I close my eyes and hot tears slide down my face.
My thirst returns, urgent. The map doesn’t matter anymore, I have to have something to drink. I turn away from the big windowless buildings into a warren of streets, and walk until I’m in a neighborhood, houses on either side, shabby and maybe some not even lived in. I cross the dead grass of a lawn and push into the bushes in front of a house, rubbing my hands over the clapboard, feeling for a spigot.
“What are you doing?” The voice makes me jump. I try to turn around but the bushes are too tight; I have to back out the way I came in. I stand up in front of a skinny man.
“You live here?” he asks, and then answers himself. “You don’t live here.”
“I’m thirsty.”
He nods, as if that’s a perfect explanation.
“I know a place you can get a drink,” he says. “Free. And a sandwich. Sound good?”
“Yes,” I tell him, a single syllable filled with all my failure, the blue line that defeated me, Clare waiting—I know she’s waiting—and the impossibility of getting to her.
“Come on then,” he says.
He’s not used to walking with a kid; he takes long steps and doesn’t look behind him, and I have to hurry on my cold-stiff legs to catch up. The sky turns orange in front of us. I don’t know where we’re going. I’m just walking, nothing but walking, the promise of water, warmth, food pulling me on.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
* * *
Lucy
I LEAVE THROUGH THE AMBULANCE BAY, stepping out into the world. The sun’s barely up. White coats are streaming past me through a misting, cool rain: the day ranks coming to work. Death Month’s over. A little celebration is in order. No cafeteria food today. I’ll get breakfast somewhere and go back to the call room for what I hope will be the last time—and when I wake up later today, I’ll rent one of the apartments I looked at. It doesn’t matter where; it’ll only be for a few months. Residency will be over soon, and the rest of my life will begin.
“Hey, Doc,” says a voice, very close, when I am halfway to the far lot where residents park. My heart lurches. Haven’t we all been told a thousand times, pay attention when you leave, don’t look at your phone, stay aware of your surroundings?
“Jesus Christ, Freddy.” It’s our frequent flyer, the philosophical hobo. “You have to stop doing that.” And then I see that he’s not alone. A smaller figure steps out from behind him, looking dirty and wet and exhausted. Ben. I can’t make the connection between them. “What are you doing out here?”
“He’s thirsty,” says Freddy.
“I’m going to Clare,” the boy says in a small, determined voice. He produces a limp square of folded paper, holds it out to me.
I’ve been up all night, I’m off duty now. I could return him to the psych floor and let them take it from there. Or take him into the ER: my training shouts that he needs hydration and electrolytes. But something inside me recoils at what that will entail: stripping him down and putting a needle into his arm, then calling Psych and Social Services, plugging him back into the system that has clearly failed him.
We took him home. Preeti’s voice comes into my mind.
I take the paper, peel apart the damp pages.
“You good?” Freddy asks the boy, who looks at me.
“Yes,” I say. “Thanks, Freddy.” He salutes and goes off in the direction of the hospital. I turn to the child. “First, what you need is a good breakfast.” Something better than rubbery hospital eggs and sugary juice. “Okay?” He nods. “Then I’ll take you where you need to go.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
/> * * *
Clare
IT’S TOTALLY DISORIENTING. FIRST GETTING the driver to understand where I want to go, and then knowing if I am really there at all.
Is this Roscommon? I see nothing I recognize. There is no field. It’s a sea of cement, with flame-shaped pear trees marooned at orderly intervals in strips of grass. The driver thinks I want to go shopping—I didn’t contradict him when he said so—and he drops me in front of a fancy kitchenware store. He gives me a phone and shows me the button to push to call him when I’m ready. He points out a shop with a green sign above it, across the parking lot. “I’ll be right in there having coffee,” he says. “They have a bathroom if you need one.” He helps me out of the car, tells me to take my time, drives off.
There’s music coming from somewhere; I can’t locate the source but it follows me as I walk by the long shop windows. I should have known it would all be gone. I spent sixty years here. Somewhere under this concrete the gallons of sweat I dropped into the earth, the seeds I planted and nurtured, charred petals from the roses that never bloomed again. My life. Swallowed up. They must have moved the graves, dug up those families and carted them off somewhere else. Nothing is sacred.
I sit on a bench and set the small box down on my lap. The ribbon is beautiful. Is that why I’m crying? For a ribbon? It’s the care, perhaps, of Belinda, who selected and curled the ribbon, thinking of me. It’s not as small a thing as it might seem.
I open the box. Inside, nestled in lavender tissue paper, is the tape recorder. Push the red button, says Gloria’s cursive on the Post-it note attached. Finish it.
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