He makes a gurgling sound, small and goatish. His left eye is blighted with red veins. His hands rest on his knees, and she wonders if he can move them at all.
“Are you my husband?” she says.
The man’s tongue pokes out and then retreats back into the cave of his mouth. He grunts. His left hand closes into a fist.
“I thought you were dead,” she says.
“Bwa,” he says, but then a nurse seizes his wheelchair, jerks him around, and trundles him off toward the corridor. Elise staggers in a panic and her LIMBs malfunction, leaving her crumpled on the carpet as the Chipmunks mock her with “Heartbreak Hotel.”
She pulls herself up, squats, then stands, wills her legs to move fast, and they do, speeding her along like a power walker, but then a CNA with dyed black hair stops her. Scans her tag, beeps the Dementia Ward, and shuffles her back to the place she’s supposed to be.
Hands folded in her lap, Elise slumps in the MEG scanner. Groggy from an antipsychotic called Vivaquel, she’s having a hard time concentrating on what the therapists are saying.
“Barbecue bubba,” says the boy. “Magnolia, moonshine, ma and pa.”
“Very original,” says the girl. “How about some limbic work? Aural olfactory?”
“Whatever,” says the boy.
“Doo-wop and gardenias.” The girl giggles. “Who the hell makes this shit up?”
Elise wishes they’d quit flirting and get on with it. She has half a mind to tell the boy that he’d be attractive with a decent haircut, but she doesn’t. She sits with her arms crossed until the boy slips in her ear buds and clamps a plastic cup over her nose. In minutes Elise smells sickly sweet aerosol air freshener. She coughs, and they lower her olfactory levels. As the Everly Brothers croon “All I Have to Do Is Dream” in their wistful Appalachian twang, she can’t help but sway to the music, breathing in a whiff of synthetic cherry, the exact scent of a Lysol spray that was marketed in the 1980s.
“She doesn’t like it,” says the boy.
“She’s responding,” says the girl. “Look at her amygdala. It’s glowing.”
Elise recalls a cramped hospital room that smelled of cherry Lysol, the green-eyed man hunched in a bed, looking at the wall. He dove into the lake one summer night and bashed his head against a rock. Now his legs wouldn’t work right and he refused to look her in the eye. She held his balled fist in both hands and squeezed. The doctor said his motor neurons were damaged, compromising his leg muscles. The doctor went on and on about partial recovery and physical therapy, but the man didn’t seem to be listening.
Elise remembers the smell of the man and the way he cleared his throat when he got nervous. She remembers how his silence filled the room every time he heard a motorboat fly by on the water. Stiffly, they’d wait for the sound to fade, and then pretend they hadn’t heard it.
She wakes up with his name on her tongue: Robert Graham Mood, otherwise known as Bob. In the depths of her Vivaquel nap, she saw him, swimming in the lake’s brown murk, down near the silty bottom. Enormous primordial catfish flickered through the hydrilla, and Bob fed them night crawlers with his hands. Right where his sick legs used to be, Bob was growing flippers, two stunted incipient fins sprouting from his knees.
This merman was her husband, Elise realized, and he was swimming away from her, toward the deepest part of the lake, where the Morrisons’ pontoon had sunk during a severe thunderstorm. The whole family had drowned: mother, father, three sons. And scuba divers swore they’d seen ghosts slithering near the wreck, glowing like electric eels.
Elise rolls onto her side. Her room has a window, but an air-conditioning unit blocks the view. And now a tech nurse is here to attach her LIMBs to her scrawny legs. As he hooks up her sensors, he doesn’t say one word, doesn’t make eye contact: he might as well be tinkering with an old lawn mower.
Out in the pear orchard, Pip Stukes comes strutting, does a little turn around a park bench, and stoops to pluck a fistful of chrysanthemums, which he presents with a debonair smirk.
“Thank you,” says Elise, shocked when the words pop out of her mouth.
“So you can talk!” says Pip. “I knew it. I could tell by the look in your eyes. I knew Elise Boykin was in there somewhere.”
Elise Mood she wants to say, but keeps her lips zipped. Elise Boykin married Bob Mood, but Pip Stukes refused to honor her changed name.
“Have you seen the goldfish pond?” Pip extends his arm, and she takes it in spite of herself. Curls her fingers around his bicep and gives it a squeeze, surprised by the wobble of muscle encased in the sagging skin. They amble over to the pond, which is tucked behind a stand of canna lilies.
“Watch this,” says Pip. He pulls a plastic bag from his pocket, shakes bread crumbs into his hand, and flings them into the water.
Elise concentrates on the oblong circle of liquid, eyeing it like an old queen gazing into a magic mirror. She sees a glimmer of orange, and then another, and another: six fish flitting up from the black depths. Lovely, greedy, they pucker their lips to suck up bits of bread.
Pip laughs and slips his arm around her, a gesture so familiar that she mechanically follows suit, twining her arm around his waist. She ought to pull away, but she doesn’t.
She studies his profile and sees him as a younger man, after his grandfather died and left him the money, after the Feed and Seed shut down and he took up jogging. He’d run by her house at dawn, handsomeness emerging from his body in the form of cheekbones and muscle tone. Meanwhile, Bob slumped, staring at the TV—a man who used to hate the tube. Called it “the idiot box,” “the shit pump,” “opiate of the masses.” But now he said nothing, just eyeballed the screen, silence filling the house like swamp gas.
She took up smoking again, would slip down to the dock and sit with her feet in the water. She’s the one who checked the catfish traps. She’s the one who picked the vegetables that summer and trucked them to the market. She still sold her chowchow and blueberry jam and eggs from the chickens whose house needed a new roof. She sold azalea seedlings to the Yankees who were buying up every last waterfront lot on the lake. After Bob’s accident, they’d sold fifty acres of their land, the woods shrinking around them, big houses popping up in every bay.
One day in July she took a break to go swimming. Just before Bob’s accident, she’d bought a French-cut one-piece that now seemed shameless—too young for forty-three—but she was alone in the cove. She dove into the water and swam out to the floating dock. Let the sun dry her hair, which had darkened to auburn over the years. And then Pip Stukes whisked by in his new motorboat, a dolphin-blue Savage Electra. He looked sharp in aviator sunglasses, slender and tan, a cigarette clenched in his teeth.
Elise eats every bit of her supper, fast, even the creamed corn. Remembering the ears of sweet corn Bob used to roast on the grill, she swallows the filthy goop. Smiles at the CNA when he sweeps up her tray. Sits waiting in bed, listening to her roommate smack up her gruel. Then she stands and teeters toward her LIMBs, which rest against a La-Z-Boy. Panting, she sits in the chair and grapples for one of the units, grabs it by the upper thigh and drags it to her, shocked by how light it is. She’s been watching the tech nurse, knows exactly how to strap the contraptions onto her legs, fastens the Velcro and then a hundred little metal snaps. She stands up. Takes a test run around the room. Pokes her head out into the hall, looks both ways, and then lurches into the white light.
Since most of the Dementia Ward nurses are in the dining room with patients, Elise has a clear shot down the hall. She makes it all the way to the main desk without incident, then stops, baffled, trying to remember which passage she took the time she came upon Robert Graham Mood. She recalls a different kind of fluorescent light, bluer than usual, a lower ceiling. That’s the one, she thinks, the one with the green wall. Elise ambles down the hall, finds the library. Over by the front desk, a solitary CNA reads a magazine.
Elise recognizes the corridor down which that bitch of a nurse took her hu
sband, a man she thought was dead. She ambles down the hallway, peeks into dim rooms, sees lumps curled on beds, aged figures zoned out before televisions. When a wheelchair emerges from one of the doorways, her heart catches, but it’s not Robert Graham Mood. She keeps walking as though she knows where she’s going, nods whenever she passes a nurse. The hallway narrows. At the end of the hall, she spots a nurses’ station around the corner, the CNA at the desk bent over a gadget.
Elise squats, scampers like a crab around the desk, almost laughing at the ease of it, and enters the little hall where the severely disabled are stashed away. She sniffs, the burn of disinfectant stronger here. And then she peers into each room until she finds him, three doors down on the left, her husband, Bob, drooping in his wheelchair before a muted TV.
She remembers that summer—when the stubble on his face grew into a dirty beard and his sideburns fanned into wild whiskers. Jimmy Carter was floundering, the oil running out, those hostages still rotting in Iran. And Bob, TV-obsessed, sat wordless as a bear. Soviets in Afghanistan and J. R. Ewing shot and Bob’s legs as weak as they were the day before. She couldn’t keep up with the okra picking. Blight had taken the tomatoes. One of their hens had an abscess that needed to be lanced. It wasn’t Bob’s sick legs that had pushed her over the edge, but his refusal to talk about the details of their shared life.
Elise steps between Bob and the TV, just like she did that day in July when she’d had enough of his silence.
His eyes stray from the screen—still the strange green, steeped in obscure feelings.
“Robert Graham Mood,” she says. And he blinks.
“Elise.” His voice rattles like a rusty cotton gin, but to her the word sounds exquisitely feminine, the name of some flower that blooms for just half a day, almost too small to see but insanely perfumed in the noon heat.
“How long have you been here?” she asks.
He looks her up and down.
“You’re my husband?” she says.
“Yes,” Bob rasps. The air conditioner drones and they stare at each other.
Elise is about to touch his arm when a CNA rushes in, smiles, speaks softly, as to a cornered kitten, and takes her firmly by the arm.
When Elise wakes up from her Vivaquel nap, a boy looms over her—Robert Graham Mood, a sleek young stunner with red hair. She frowns, for Bob’s hair had been black, his lips plump and just a tad crooked. She thinks she may be dead at last, Bob’s golden spirit hovering to welcome her to the next phase.
“Mom,” says the boy.
When her eyes adjust, she notes lines around his eyes, the bulge of a budding gut. Not the father but the son.
“Just give her a few minutes,” says the nurse. “According to the neurotherapists, she’s made enormous strides. Her roaming incident shows some planning, thinking ahead, which indicates enhanced semantic memory.”
“And you think she knows he’s my father?”
“She knows he’s somebody. Found him halfway across the complex. I had no idea they’d even been married.”
“They still are, technically, you know.”
Elise snorts at this, but nobody pays one bit of attention.
“Of course. Very odd, though it happens from time to time. Married people in different wings. We don’t do couples at Eden Village.”
“It really didn’t matter until now,” says the boy, sinking into the chair by the bed. “I didn’t think the therapies would lead to anything, with her so far gone. But still, I figured why not?”
Elise claws at her throat, her tongue as dead as a slab of pickled beef. She knows the boy is her son, but she can’t remember when he was born or how he got to be grown so fast.
“Mom,” says the boy, that familiar tinge of whininess in his voice, and it comes to her: her son home from college for a few days, pacing from window to window, restless as a cooped rooster. He said the house felt smaller than he remembered. Stayed out on the boat all day with the spoiled-rotten Morrison boys. Acted skittish when he came in from the water, pained eyes hiding behind the soft flounce of his bangs. He’d gone vegetarian, looked as skinny as Gandhi, and she fed him fried okra and butterbeans.
As the two of them sat at the kitchen table making conversation, Bob’s silence leaked from the boy’s old bedroom like nuclear radiation from a triple-sealed vault—the kind of poison you can’t smell but that sinks into your cells, making you mutant from the inside out.
“Bye, Mom.” The boy pats her crimped hand. “I’ll be back soon.” And they leave her in the semidarkness, window shades down, unable to tell if it’s night or day.
The therapists have strapped her into the MEG scanner and popped in a retro-TV sense-enhanced module. While they play footsy under the desk, Elise turns her attention to a montage of The Incredible Hulk episodes, breathing in smells of Hamburger Helper and Bounce fabric-softening sheets. She never cooked Hamburger Helper; she never wasted money on fabric softeners. She never sat through a complete episode of The Hulk, but the seething mute giant reminds her of Bob, who watched it religiously after his accident. She remembers peering into his room, standing there in the hallway for just one minute to watch the green monster rage. Then she’d close the door, drift out into the night with her pack of cigarettes.
Now the screen goes dim and Elise hears crickets, smells cigarette smoke and a hint of gas. Pip’s boat had a leak that summer, and everything they did was enveloped in the haze of gasoline. What did they do? Zigzagged over the lake. Dropped the anchor and sat rocking in the waves, drinking wine coolers and watching for herons. Then they’d drift up to this island he knew. The first time Pip took her to his secret island—the one with the feral goats and rotting shed—she drank until her head thrummed. Bob had not said one word for sixty-two days. Each night before bed she’d stick her head into the toxic glow of his room to say good night, and he’d grunt. She kept track of the days. Ticked them off with a pencil on a yellow legal pad.
He sat there glued to the TV, waiting for news on the hostages, wondering if Afghanistan had turned Communist yet, trying to figure out who shot J. R. She even caught him watching soaps in the middle of the day—like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives—foolishness he used to laugh at. Now he sat grimly as Marlena mourned the death of her premature son and her marriage to a two-timing lawyer fell apart. The dismal music, the tedious melodrama, and the flimsy opulent interiors sank Elise into a malaise. And she’d leave Bob in the eternal twilight of the TV.
Out in the humming afternoon heat, Elise had started talking to herself. Goddamn grass, she’d hiss. Bastard ants. One day, in the itchy okra patch, where unpicked pods had swollen into eight-inch monsters, where fire ants marched up and down the sticky stalks, crawling onto her hands and stinging her in the tender places between her fingers, Elise ripped off her sun hat and shrieked. Then she stormed inside and changed into her swimsuit. Without looking in on Bob, she grabbed her smokes and jogged out to the cove, walked waist-deep into the water while taking fierce drags. Fuck, she hissed—a trashy cuss she never indulged in. And then she felt drained of wrath.
She tossed her cigarette butt and swam out to the floating dock, where the water was cooler. Pip Stukes came knifing through the waves, skinny again, his sunglasses two mirrors that hid his sad eyes, and Elise crawled up into his glittery boat. She swigged wine coolers like they were Cokes and laughed a high, dry laugh that was half cough. She lost track of herself: let another man kiss her on an island where shadowy goats watched from the woods. She stayed out past dusk and got a sunburn, a bright red affliction that she didn’t feel until the next day.
When she came in that night, Bob didn’t ask where she’d been. Didn’t say one word. Just kept clearing his throat over and over, as though he had something stuck in it—a bit of gristle in his windpipe, a dry spot on his glottis, acid gushing up from his bad stomach. He cleared his throat when she served him supper (one hour later than usual). Cleared his throat when she changed his sheets and punched his pillow
with her small fist. Cleared his throat when she quietly shut his door, and kept on clearing his throat as she brushed her teeth and crawled into the bed they’d shared for twenty years.
Elise’s skin blistered and peeled. For several nights she lay in bed rolling it into little balls that she’d flick into the darkness. And then, one week later, her skin tender, the pale pink of a seashell’s interior, she went off with Pip Stukes again.
“I figured out how they catch us,” whispers Pip.
Elise widens her eyes. As they take a turn around the birdbath, she scans the crowd for wheelchairs. They sit down on a concrete bench.
“Feel that bump on your arm?” Pip slides the tip of his index finger over her forearm, stops when he reaches that hard little pimple that won’t go away. Maybe it’s a wart. Maybe it’s a mole. Elise doesn’t know what it is, but she blushes when he touches the spot.
“Microchip,” he says. “My son put one in his dog’s ear. A good idea. Except we’re not dogs.”
Pip laughs, the old, dark laugh that lingers in the air. Elise can’t remember Pip’s children. And what about his wife? He must have had one. But now she’s unsettled by his eyes, the clear one at least, which drills her with a secret force while the other stares at nothing.
Something about his laugh and fading smile, something about the slant of light and the wash of distant traffic remind her—of what, she’s not sure, not until the blush spreads from her hairline to her chest, not until she sees Pip walking naked from the lake, sees the scar on his chest, the sad apron of belly skin, relic of his previous life as a fat man. And then she remembers. He did have a wife, a girl named Emmy from Silver. They’d had two boys and divorced. Emmy had kept the house in Manning, and Pip moved out to the lake house, free to whip around on the empty water.
For two months they boated out to the little island almost every afternoon. Got sucked into the oblivion of the dog days: shrieking cicadas and heat like a blanket of wet velvet that made you feel half-asleep. It was easy to sip wine coolers until you couldn’t think. Easy to swim naked in water warm as spit. In September they finally went to his lake house, a fancy place with lots of gleaming brass, the TV built into a clever cabinet, a stash of top-notch liquor behind the wet bar. Showing her around, Pip pointed out every last effect, all bought with his grandfather’s money. Something bothered her: the way he slapped her rear like a rake on Dallas, the way he smoked afterward in the air-conditioned bedroom. Hiding his saggy gut under the sheet, he kept checking himself out in the mirror. He ran his fingers through his gelled hair.
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