Noah kicks soccer balls into a net on the lawn below, and his sandy-haired head bobs between the misty green fringe of some hemlocks. It’s his third day off from school and he’s cranky and bored. He climbs into the brush. “What are you doing?”
Mark points to the blackberry bushes. “This is where we’re going to build something.”
“What?”
“A shelter.”
Noah frowns. “Like in World War II?”
“Sort of. More like an underground room where we could go in an emergency.”
“What kind of an emergency?”
Mark hands his son the end of the tape measure and points to a spot on the ground. “Stand right there.” The tape measure crackles as he pulls it open. “Hold it tight.”
“An emergency like you talked about at work? The mountain erupting?”
“I hope we never have to use it.” Mark doesn’t want to say any more than that. “But if we do, it’s here. Ready to go.” He walks backward, slowly because of the uneven ground, until he reaches twelve feet. He shakes the spray can and draws an X on the ground.
“We’re going to build it ourselves?” Noah asks.
“Yup.”
“How?”
Mark measures out twenty feet, and then another twelve. The sharp smell of the paint overpowers the pinesap and wet earth. “We’re going to use a kit.”
Noah looks interested now. Besides playing sports, he likes building things. K’nex and Lego sets, with complicated directions for constructing space stations or pirate ships.
“It’ll be like one of your Lego sets, only a whole lot bigger.” Mark draws the last X. “Your turn.” He gives Noah the can.
Noah draws shaky yellow lines connecting the X’s over the pine needles, twigs, and bolete mushrooms that cover the ground. “Now what?”
Mark pulls the plans for the shelter from his pocket and shows them to Noah. The sheets are creased because every time he thinks of the Other Mark and his dirty, terrified face, he takes them out, unfolds them, and reads them again.
The top sheet has the fortress logo and the words
THE BUNKER ROOM by Hard Top Structures
The answer to the “WHAT IF’S?” of modern life
A long list of hypothetical worst-case scenarios takes up the first page: tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, forest fires, mudslides, dirty bombs, nuclear apocalypse. Mark flips past before Noah can read the list, and finds a black-and-white picture of a floor plan. A few smudged notations in his cramped handwriting dot the page. “See here,” he points to the back wall of the structure on the piece of paper, and then to the corresponding line on the ground. “This part of the shelter will be completely underground. Only the front wall will be visible. The rest will be built into the slope of the yard.”
“How are we going to get it underground?”
“We’ll rent a backhoe.”
“You know how to use a backhoe?” Noah is skeptical.
“I’ve used one once, when I helped with a watershed project in California.” Well, he watched someone use it, anyway.
“Does Mom know?”
Mark waves the sheets of paper in the air to dismiss the question. “Don’t worry about Mom.” He points to the plans. “This is called a blast door, made of reinforced steel. Like the door to a bank vault.”
He faces the spray-painted outline and makes a motion as if to open a door. “It’ll be right here.” He walks inside the outline, and it feels good. He imagines strong cinder block walls all around. A feeling of security and calm. “Come inside.”
Noah follows his dad into the pretend shelter. “What’ll it be made of?” he asks quietly. “Wood?”
“We’ll build it with concrete and steel. It’ll have a good air filter, too, to keep the air inside clean and safe.” Mark turns the pages to show the pictures of the different components that will be delivered to their house: steel trusses and rebar, ventilation pipes of different sizes, concrete blocks.
Noah scratches his arm where it brushed up against a blackberry bramble. “Would we sleep in here?”
“Sure, if we needed to. There will be enough room for a few cots.”
A misty rain starts to fall; it patters against the dead leaves on the ground.
“What else would we have inside?” Noah pulls up his hood and walks around the imaginary room.
“Whatever we want. Anything we think is important. Food and lots of water, enough for several days. A first-aid kit.”
Noah thinks for a minute. “No TV, right? No PlayStation.”
“Nope. There won’t be electricity. We would be using flashlights and battery-operated lanterns.”
“It would be just you, me, and Mom? And the cats—”
“Exactly. Just us. And the cats.”
“Mom will want books. A bunch, because she’s a fast reader.”
Mark laughs. He takes off his glasses and wipes them with his shirtsleeve. “Good idea.”
Noah is silent for a minute. “When are you going to tell her?”
“Soon.”
Noah doesn’t say anything.
“She may not be super thrilled with the idea,” Mark admits. “She thinks I worry too much.”
“But she won’t notice,” Noah says. “Not right away. Because she’s so busy.”
Mark nods. It’s true. “But we can’t do anything until we get these blackberry bushes cleared out.” He steps outside the pretend door. “I’m going to Home Depot to buy a chainsaw. Want to come?”
“Can we pick Livi up on the way?”
“You think she’d want to come?”
“Yeah. She’s by herself—”
Mark thinks for a minute. “What about Peter?”
“He’s in Portland with his nana until we go back to school.”
“Okay. Sure. Livi can come.”
* * *
—
Samara waits until her father leaves the house to start searching. It doesn’t take her long to discover something. She opens desk drawers in the room her mother used as her home office. Inside the first: a stack of index cards with Spanish sayings printed in her mother’s handwriting. In the second: a multicolored mountain of buttons. The third: a sheaf of papers including a bill of sale for a small house in Sarapiquí. The papers are dated over a year ago.
“Sarapiquí,” Samara says out loud, and the unfamiliar syllables sound strange in the quiet room. She types the word into a search engine on the computer and images of the rainforest fill the screen: dark green leaves covered in droplets of rain, striped beetles with impossibly long antennae, tiny neon-green frogs. Birds the size of a cat or small dog. Monkeys with heart-shaped, tomato-red faces.
Sarapiquí, Wikipedia tells her, is a small town at the edge of the rainforest in the northern plains of Costa Rica. Birdwatchers travel there from all over the world to see great green macaws and sunbitterns and Muscovy ducks. In the winter in Sarapiquí, birds that have migrated from the United States and Canada—western tanagers and yellow warblers and Baltimore orioles—mingle with tropical birds like scarlet macaws and agami herons.
She tries to imagine her mom in Sarapiquí and pictures a woman with long, damp hair wearing a yellow dress. She climbs smooth stone steps with bare feet and raises a small pair of binoculars to her eyes. The woman is like her mother but also not like her mother. She is a younger, healthier version of her mother. She has bright eyes. Her skin is tan and smooth; there’s no port scar underneath the straps of her dress.
Samara opens another drawer and finds a file folder containing an unpublished MLS listing for her parents’ house.
LISTING:
1041 Pine Cone Court $349,000
Clearing, OR LS#: 54289
Bedrooms: 3
Square feet: 2,215
Bathrooms: 2.5 Year built: 1959
Garage size: 2 Taxes: $4,685/yr
Number of rooms: 8 Heating/cooling: Gas heat, no cooling
Lot description: Level Basement: Partial; crawlspace
View: Trees, obstructed valley
Schools: Niels Bohr Elementary
Linus Pauling Middle School
Clearing High School
Notice: Owner is listing agent
Enjoy the beauty of nature from your backyard. Don’t miss this three-bedroom, 2.5-bath woodland retreat. Single-level living on a rare cul-de-sac perfect for families, retirees. Minutes to the university and downtown. Fireplace in the family room for cozy winter evenings. Backyard features drip irrigation and four raised garden beds. This well-maintained home won’t last long. Presented by: Ashmina Mehta, Broken Mountain Realty.
She shakes her head at her mother’s description of her own house. The picture she paints is appealing but also impersonal. Anyone would love this house, the ad seems to say. But not just anyone loved this house. Her mother loved this house. She loved it, but she was going to sell it. Why?
She goes into her parents’ bedroom. It looks exactly the same. In the light from the window dust motes float through the air. Her mother’s soft robe hangs from a hook on the closet door, and a tall stack of books sits on her bedside table, The Cancer Survivor’s Workbook, Planting an Edible Garden, Organize Your Life!, Superfoods for Cancer Prevention.
She rests her hand on the footboard of the bed. Her father made the bed neatly this morning, pulling the cover smooth. It’s hard to imagine her parents ever planning to leave this room.
The closet door whines when she opens it. She thumbs through a rainbow of suits and scarves and dresses, and her mother’s sweet and earthy perfume fills her nose. Everything she touches is familiar—the geometric print dress her mom wore to her college graduation, the oversized blue button-down she used for gardening, a tasseled scarf she wrapped around her head when she lost her hair.
But when she reaches deeper into the closet she finds a neon-yellow jacket that looks like something a mountaineer would wear. Also, three pairs of nylon pants that zip off into shorts, tags dangling from their back pockets, and two floppy hats lined with mesh.
She reaches into the closet again, and when she finds another yellow jacket, identical to the first, she thinks her mom must have bought one for herself and the other for her dad. But no, they’re both women’s jackets; the only difference is their size. One is a large and the other a medium. Next to it is yet another jacket, exactly the same, only this one’s a small. There are also six more pairs of nylon pants, one identical to the next, except in size.
Samara shakes her head. But then she understands. She kept buying them. That’s why. The sicker she got, the smaller she became. Every time she shrunk a little more, she bought another size.
Samara turns to her father’s sparser side of the closet. To his suits and shirts. Some old moth-eaten sweaters that ought to be thrown out. Her father who has never willingly gone on a hike in his life, who doesn’t even like sitting out in the backyard. She’s heard him complain the breeze ruffles the pages of his book, that he prefers to watch the birds through the kitchen window. She rifles through the stuff piled at the top of the closet, but finds only a bunch of T-shirts with paint spattered on them and a pair of ancient sneakers with no laces.
She thinks of the woman in the yellow dress, climbing stone stairs in the humid air of Sarapiquí. She tries hard to imagine her father beside this woman, but his image stays stubbornly fixed to the here and now. Her father does not live in a rainforest; he sits in his puffy chair in front of the television with his slippered feet propped on top of the coffee table. He mows the lawn in an old T-shirt and shorts. He organizes groceries in the kitchen pantry with NPR on in the background.
She takes the smallest of her mother’s neon-yellow jackets from the closet and puts it on. She pulls on the next size, and then the next. She puts on the pants, too, until her body is muffled in slippery fabric. She finds other things with tags, and she puts these on too: a pair of thick-treaded sandals that smell like new rubber, an ugly reflective vest, an orange backpack with zippered pockets. Last she puts one of the mesh hats on top of her head.
She regards herself in the mirror. The hat sits crookedly, and she straightens it. She pulls the backpack’s straps taut, and puts her hands on her hips. She looks like an explorer, an adventurer, a scout.
This plan of her mother’s to change her life—it was so important she held on to it until the very end. She wants to ask her mom, Why was it so important? She wants to ask her, What was wrong with what you already had?
She walks to the kitchen, her body laden with all the gear, fabric hissing as she moves. She grabs a handful of trash bags and brings them back to her parents’ room. She takes off the backpack and hat, balls them up, and pushes them into a bag. She removes the reflective vest and the coat and the jackets and presses them into the bag too. Then the pants and the sandals. Also a pair of birding binoculars she finds in a box under the bed and some books from the bedside table, Pocket Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica and Into the Woods: Memoir of a Rainforest. Anything that looks like it belongs to this version of her mother she doesn’t know. That she doesn’t want to know.
She’s breathing hard by the time she’s done. She pulls the trash bags through the house and they slide across the floor with a sound like shhhh. When she tugs them down the hazy front walk, the thin plastic catches on the concrete and tears, but she keeps going. She hauls them into her trunk and closes the lid, hard. She stands there for a second, her hand on the top of the car, droplets of rain pooling under her palm. Then she turns around and stares at the spot on the grass where she saw her mother. She wills her to appear again. Come out, she wants to say. Come out and explain yourself.
ELEVEN
GINNY FIDGETS IN her chair in the Imaging waiting room. She picks up a magazine, a battered copy of Good Housekeeping, and puts it back down. She checks her phone, and stares at the receptionist and tries to gauge how long it’s going to take. She picks up the magazine again, flips through its limp pages. But she doesn’t see the print on the page. Other words and phrases rise up in her mind:
brain tumor
it could be benign, but
Noah, Mark
a side effect from her new beta-blockers
a mass
Noah, Noah, Noah
They finally call her name and an MRI tech wearing brown scrubs leads her to a small dressing room. He reads off his clipboard. “Mrs. McDonnell, we’ve got you scheduled for a head scan, is that correct?”
She frowns at being called Mrs. McDonnell, but stops herself from telling him she’s the chief of surgery and signs more orders for MRIs than any other doctor in the hospital. He hands her a gown to change into and she takes it reluctantly. “Be sure to remove any metal on your person—jewelry, keys, etc.” He consults her chart. “To confirm, you have no pacemaker, metal screws, or plates in your body?”
“No, nothing.”
“You can put your valuables in that locker.”
Once he’s gone she pulls off her scrubs, her wedding band. She pushes her arms through the light-blue gown—the fabric has been washed so many times it’s translucent. Did the tech tell her to wait in the room or come out when she’s done? It’s cold, and she hates standing here in the kind of gown her patients wear.
There’s a knock at the door.
“Hold on.” She’s forgotten to secure her gown at the back. As she fumbles with the ties, the door opens, but instead of the tech in brown scrubs, it’s Edith.
“Hi,” she says. Her freckles are bright under the fluoresce
nt lights.
“Um, hi?” Ginny grasps the back of her gown. Her cheeks burn. She remembers Edith and the other Ginny—her twin—pressed together, nose to nose, in her kitchen.
Edith steps into the room and closes the door behind her. Ginny is painfully aware of her polka-dot socks, a Christmas gift from Noah, and her washed-out underwear that sags in the back.
“What’s going on with you?” Edith asks. The room is so small Edith’s face is only inches from hers. Her breath smells sweet. “You’ve been acting weird.”
Ginny lets go of the back of her gown long enough to reach for her pager. “What do you mean?” She reads an old page so she doesn’t have to look Edith in the eye.
“I waited for you after our case the other night. I wanted to tell you about Dr. Pierce and this crazy patient from the coast. But you disappeared—”
“I had to deal with something.”
“Okay.” Edith pauses. “What are you getting scanned? Got a bum knee or something?”
“Something like that.” Ginny tightens her grip on the back of her gown. “It’s a head scan,” she adds, and then wishes she hadn’t.
“Oh.”
She can see Edith wants to ask for more details.
“It’s nothing serious.”
“Have you ever had an MRI?”
“No.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you have to lie there and let someone else be in charge.”
Ginny can’t help it. She laughs. “Wow. Tell me what you really think.”
“Seriously. It’s tight in there. Claustrophobic…”
Edith keeps talking, but Ginny is only half listening. She likes standing close to Edith in the small room. They’ve known each other for a long time. They’ve spent hundreds of hours looking at each other across the operating table. But they’ve never been this close.
If, Then Page 8