The Decoding of Lana Morris

by Laura McNeal

  The door is only partly closed and she pushes it open with her elbow. He doesn’t stir and she tiptoes across the carpet and stands with the tray for a few seconds, watching him sleep. What’s strange is how closed down his face seems—it’s clamped tight as a walnut—though when Lana whispers his name and his eyes blink open, his face at once relaxes into a smile.

  “You missed breakfast,” she says. “This is lunch.”

  He glances at the tray, then back at her. “Don’t know which looks yummier, the sandwich or the long, tall waitress.”

  Lana sets the tray on the nightstand beside him and wonders if he can tell she’s blushing. The remark both pleases and unsettles her—she decides to say nothing.

  “Guess you think I say that to all the waitresses,” he says.

  “So … do you?”

  Whit grins and takes a bite into the sandwich. “Nope. Only the yummy ones.” He chews and grins and looks at Lana so frankly that she feels discombobulated.

  “So what happened to Veronica?” she says. “The accident, I mean.”

  Whit keeps chewing but looks away. “She was driving home and ran a light. Car coming the other way was doing at least forty.” He frowns and picks up a fallen piece of egg white. “At the hospital she told the cop it was because she’s color blind.”

  “She’s color blind?”

  He shrugs. “A little bit.” He looks at the sandwich in his hand and purses his lips slightly. “More so whenever she runs a red light.”

  “Wouldn’t a color-blind person know that the top light is red and the bottom one is green, or whatever it is?”

  “Well, if you was talking about a sober color-blind person, the answer would be yes. But we’re not.” His gaze drifts. “She’ll lose her license over this one, guaranteed.”

  Whit takes another bite. The room is quiet. Through the open windows a breeze moves the pale cotton curtains in a way that makes Lana think of ghosts. She says, “When Veronica left, she seemed worried about you.”

  He turns. “Worried?”

  “As in jealous.”

  Whit had stopped chewing, but now he resumes. “Oh, that.”

  “Oh, that?”

  “Veronica’s always been the jealous type.”

  Lana remembers Hallie’s phrase: with cause. She says, “With or without cause?”

  Whit picks a crumb from the bedspread and drops it on his plate. He seems to be choosing his words. “You’re getting in a little over your head here, Lana.” He makes a smile that seems sad. “I’ll say this much. I’m no saint, and neither is Veronica.” He looks into Lana’s eyes. “But I’ve sworn off the extracurricular stuff. If I’m with Veronica, I’m with Veronica, just like if I was with you, I’d be with you.”

  For the second time in this conversation, she wonders if he can see her blushing. “Do you mean that you want to adopt me but Veronica doesn’t?”

  Something registers in his eyes, and she can’t say for sure what it is. Pity? Concern?

  “Maybe we should talk about this another time,” Whit says. “I’m not making sense.”

  She says, “But you are with her. She’s who you’re married to.”

  “That’s right,” Whit says quietly. “She is.”

  Lana can’t think of what to say or even what to think. “I’ve got to go now,” she says.

  Whit pushes a last bite of sandwich into his mouth. “Me too.”

  “You’re going to the hospital?”

  He nods. He sets the plate on the tray and throws back the covers. He’s still wearing his street clothes from the night before, except for his feet. When he sits up and swings them out, she sees they’re bare.

  Lana retreats, but as she closes the door, she can’t help glancing back. Whit has slipped out of his shirt and is walking toward the bathroom with his back to her. Lana has guessed that Whit is small inside his clothes, but that doesn’t prepare her for what she sees. The joints of his spine look like fingertips pushing through the smooth white skin, and from within each of his shoulder blades a hand seems to be pushing out, palms first.

  Lana quietly pulls the door closed, but she has the feeling that what she’s just seen will alter her feelings about Whit Winters. Alter and complicate them.

  Because now she has an image she can’t get rid of—the image of a person trapped inside him trying to get out.

  20.

  Lana closes the door to her room, sits on the bed, and tries to stay perfectly still, as if by doing this she might become a rock or stick or bone, something free of thought and feeling, but she isn’t rock or stick or bone and through the walls she hears a toilet flush and then she hears the water pipes tremble and whine as the shower starts.

  So he’s taking a shower before going to the hospital.

  Wanting to look good for Veronica.

  Well, why shouldn’t he? He’s her husband. She’s his wife.

  Downstairs, the Snicks are suddenly talking and moving, which means the video must be over. Lana should go down, but she doesn’t. She slides the black box of sketching paper from under the bed. She’s thinking of drawing Chet standing over the lawn mower, or Whit eating in bed, or maybe even Whit walking across the room with his shoulder blades like the hands of someone trying to get out, but she knows that would be death squared if Veronica found it, and finding things is Veronica’s specialty.

  The sketch lying on top of the other paper is of Veronica the Ice Queen. The more Lana stares at it, the more she thinks it really does reveal the coldness in Veronica the world can’t see. It captures the deep-freeze cruelty that Veronica keeps hidden even from photographers. The drawing is good, Lana sees that plain as day, but she feels no particular pride in this fact. She feels only vaguely connected to the sketch, as if her sister had drawn it or maybe a cousin.

  As Lana gazes at the drawing, she suddenly realizes something that stops her cold: what she’d erased the prior day was Veronica’s left arm to the elbow.

  Lana feels in her bones that this means something but doesn’t know what—it’s as if she’s just received a telegram but can’t open it.

  She stares out the window awhile, until in fact she hears Whit’s hard heels on the hallway floor, down the wooden stairs. A question occurs to Lana, a question Whit can answer. He’s already out the kitchen door and on his way to his truck when she catches up. “Whit?”

  He turns.

  Lana can’t quite speak.

  “What?” Whit says. He’s not exactly impatient, but she can see he’s ready to go.

  “I was wondering,” she says, “which arm was it Veronica lost?”

  Whit looks down and raises first his right hand, then his left. “Left,” he says.

  “You’re sure?”

  He cocks his head. “Sure, I’m sure. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. I just wondered.”

  Whit is staring at her. “You okay, Lana?”

  She nods.

  “Okay, then. I’d better go.” But he doesn’t go. He stands looking into her. “I’ve got to tell you … a little while ago, when I woke up and you were there … I know I was joking around with you, but … laying eyes on you before anything else”—his expression turns oddly serious—“it was like waking up in my own little corner of heaven.”

  For the third time in less than an hour, Lana wonders if he can tell she’s blushing.

  And then he is gone.

  Lana goes back into the house trying to figure out what she is feeling. Tilly is swinging on the front porch with Carlito. Alfred is writing and creaking his teeth. Garth is wearing his Hulk shirt and twisting Popeye’s head.

  In the kitchen Lana takes a Tanya Tucker CD out of the computer, puts in disc two of Little Walter, then begins rinsing the lunch dishes and arranging them in the dishwasher. In her mind she goes through the things that feel like facts.

  On a sunny day she sketches a storm and then it rains.

  She leaves the mole off Chet’s face and suddenly his mole medicine works and the mole
disappears.

  She erases part of Veronica’s left arm from another sketch and then Veronica gets in a car crash and loses part of her left arm.

  Well, what of it? Lana thinks. Didn’t unexpected thunderstorms come along? Didn’t mole medicines sometimes work? Didn’t people get in accidents and get hurt? And it didn’t snow, did it? In the drawing, Veronica was wrapped in a snow robe and not a single snowflake had since fallen in Two Rivers.

  Came home this morning about half-past four, Little Walter is singing. Found that note lying on my floor. And then a long riff on the mouth harp.

  “Little Walter’s the guy that brought the mouth harp from the country to the city.” That’s what Whit had said about him when he heard Lana playing his songs.

  And then Lana is thinking of Whit, of him looking into her and calling her his own little corner of heaven. She knows that what she feels for Whit is love, helpless and deep. Standing near him is like standing waist deep in the Niobrara River. He’s married. He’s fifteen years older than she is. He’s what the state calls her father. And pretty soon Veronica’s going to separate them for what Lana has to admit is pretty good cause.

  Don’t send no doctor, Little Walter sings. He won’t do no good.

  Lana doesn’t have much time. Any second one of the Snicks will need her for something. She wipes the counters and goes quietly up to her room. She stares at the drawing of Veronica, especially at what remains of the left arm. She’s had an idea, a strange idea that scares her a little, but finally she decides she will do it.

  She takes out the eraser and carefully rubs out the left arm up to that point where it converts to shoulder.

  A meaningless act, she tells herself, because erasing something from a picture can’t make it disappear.

  That isn’t how things work in the real world.

  21.

  That night, Whit comes home with the news that there’s been an infection and they are going to have to take a bit more of Veronica’s arm.

  Lana, at the dinner table, stills a spoonful of creamed corn. A strong surge of bile shoots up from her stomach. She puts her spoon down and takes a sip of water.

  “What’s that mean, a bit more of her arm?” she says.

  Whit has seated himself and is spooning rice and gravy over his hamburger steak. “Up to the shoulder,” he says. “They were talking about it yesterday, so it wasn’t totally unexpected.”

  This time the bile is thicker and surges into Lana’s mouth. She runs for the bathroom, where she throws up everything she’s eaten. Her body trembles, and her skin is slick with sweat. She’s on all fours, and when she glimpses herself in the full-length mirror, she thinks of a human in some myth being turned into a small groveling beast.

  Behind her, the door eases open and Tilly sticks her head in. “Okay, Lana? All right?”

  But Lana’s eyes are fixed on the sweating, girl-like creature in the mirror.

  A creature with the power to make true what isn’t and to erase what is.

  “Lana okay?” Tilly asks again.

  Lana doesn’t know what to answer. And then she doesn’t have to. Whit is behind her now. “You through?” he says, and when she nods, yes, and wipes her lips with the sleeve of her shirt, he puts his hands under her arms and helps her to her feet, but trying to stand, her legs go rubbery. As they fold closed, Whit catches hold of her, one arm fully across her chest for a moment before he spins her slightly, and, throwing one arm beneath her knees and the other under her arms, he lifts her into the air and carries her upstairs. He is not a big man and even in her sweaty, nauseous state she is aware of the ease with which he manages this, and she thinks, I’ll bet he’s a good dancer.

  He lays her on the bed and pulls a sheet around her. He asks Tilly to bring a glass of 7UP or ginger ale. Lana has her eyes closed but feels Whit’s weight when he sits on the side of her bed. She opens her eyes. He’s staring off. He looks like a man peering out from solitary confinement. When finally he takes a deep breath and begins to turn toward her, she closes her eyes.

  “Lana,” he whispers.

  She doesn’t open her eyes. She pretends she doesn’t know why, but she does. She senses that her having her eyes closed will make it easier for him to say what he wants to say but knows he shouldn’t. She thinks when she hears these words, they will be spoken with the voice of the person inside him, the one wanting to push his way out.

  “Lana,” he says again, but abruptly stops. Tennis shoes squeak on the stairs. Whit Winters doesn’t say another word. Instead he takes up her clenched hand and unfolds it. With the soft tip of his finger he writes four letters on her palm, each letter sending through her skin ticklish feelings that flow to the furthest and most intimate parts of her body. She knows what letters they are and what word they spell. L a n a.

  The squeaking footsteps move closer. He closes her hand over the invisible letters.

  The tinkling of ice and glass becomes audible.

  “Soda and snack coming right up, you bet!” Tilly says, and when Lana opens her eyes, Tilly is holding a tall glass with ice and a can of root beer inside. That’s in one hand. In the other hand she is carrying a bowl of strictly pink Froot Loops.

  Lana makes a weak laugh. “Pinkies are better than yellows,” Lana says, and Tilly nods beamingly.

  On his way out, Whit stops at the door and, looking back at Lana, he smiles so small a smile that Lana guesses that she alone in the world would know that it is one. She reaches up to feel for the lost two-dollar bill and then tries to remember how long it’s been since she thought of it or of the man named Dee, who had been her father.

  Part Two

  22.

  Almost a week has passed. Lana had hoped in a half-guilty way that in Veronica’s absence the house would be theirs, hers and Whit’s, but Whit has hardly been home—he’s been at the hospital a lot and out bidding a whole slew of painting jobs (though he hasn’t landed any of them)—and when he has been home, the Snicks have been greedy for his company and have followed him so closely he’s been like a man with four shadows. Five if you counted Lana.

  Every now and then, he would catch her eye and hold it in a wistful-seeming way, but then one of the Snicks would say, “Play ball, Whit!” or “ ’Eed ’elp, ’it!” and the moment would be gone. Hardly a full minute passes by without Lana’s mind returning to the sketch paper and the powers it seems to contain. Repeatedly she thinks of getting out the paper and making a drawing of Whit and herself, with absolutely nothing else on the page, nothing and no one else to interfere, but whenever she thinks of it, she wonders if it might mean that they’d somehow be dropped into a blank, bleak landscape without food or shelter or even hope or, just as bad, if she drew only her and Whit, somehow something bad might happen to Tilly and Garth and Carlito and everybody else she leaves out of the sketch, and the one thing she doesn’t want to do with the paper ever again is accidentally hurt somebody, so, in the end, she has just kept the drawing kit hidden away and not drawn anything at all.

  The night before, Lana heard Whit come in late, and when he didn’t come upstairs, she put on a robe and crept down. He was sitting at the kitchen table reading the World-Herald sports page, which he tipped to pick up the dim light from the single overhead lamp. He didn’t see her and she just stood silently watching him for maybe a minute, aware and yet not aware of her tongue in the tooth slit, until he rattlingly turned back the paper and started scanning the headlines of the next page.

  “Hi,” she said.

  His hand jumped. Then, “Hey, you. Did I wake you up? I was trying for quiet.”

  “You didn’t wake me. Your diesel did.”

  He laughed and laid down his paper.

  She slid into the chair opposite him. “Tired?” she said.

  “And then some.”

  “Were you at the hospital?”

  He nodded. “She says she can’t sleep if I’m not there.” He made a rueful smile. “Problem is, I can’t sleep when I’m there. A nurse took pity
and had a chair brought in that reclines a little bit, but still …” He arched his back to demonstrate the stiffening effect of it. He was quiet then for a second or two, staring at her in the shadowy light, and then he extended his arms onto the table. “Lemme see your hands.”

  She slid her hands forward. He took them in his, gently turned them over, and began smoothing his thumbs over her palms, slowly, in a way that sent sensations through her arms to the most secret parts of her body “It’s clear you’re working way too hard,” he said in a soft voice.

  She didn’t reply. She didn’t want to speak. All she wanted was to keep receiving the sensations she was now receiving.

  “You doing okay?” he said.

  She nodded.

  He let his thumb stray from her open palm up to the softness of her inner wrist, and if at that moment he’d asked her to follow him to any room of the house, she would’ve risen and followed, she couldn’t have done anything else, but he didn’t ask that. He let go of her hands and said, “You know what? If I don’t go up to bed now, I’m going to fall asleep on this table and then our Snickledy friends will get up in the morning and eat me for breakfast.”

  She laughed, but the truth was, she was annoyed he could touch her skin and swell her with feeling and then, with just a joking word or two, disappear on her. When he pushed back from the table, she felt such a desperate need to keep him there that she heard herself blurt, “What would you do if you had three wishes?”

  He chuckled. “Easy. Ask for three more.”

  “No, really,” she said, because she knew that would keep him. One of the things she liked about Whit Winters was that he would think about things. If you asked him something and he saw you were serious, he’d give it his best serious thought.

  Now he said, “You ever hear the story of the fisherman and his wife?”

  Lana had, but she couldn’t remember the specifics, and besides, she wanted Whit to stay, so she shook her head, no.

  “Well, this fisherman and his wife are peasants, poor as can be, living in a dirt-floor hut, eating fish head soup every night for dinner. And then he catches a holy mackerel, or something like that, and the mackerel can talk. It pleads for its life, and the fisherman decides that a talking fish is too mysterious and powerful to kill. He tosses the mackerel back and runs home to tell his wife, which was bad thinking on his part. She says right away the fish owes them big and sends him to ask the mackerel for a cottage. Presto, they’re in one, but after a couple of days she looks around and she’s still not happy. She sends her husband back to the fish, asking for a mansion, then a palace, then to be queen, empress, pope, and finally, ‘like the good Lord.’ ”