by Jack Ketchum
“’Course I do.”
“You remember any others?”
“I dunno. I guess.”
“Which ones?”
“I dunno.”
“Name me one.”
She shifts uncomfortably in the seat. “Why are we going to the hospital, Patrick?”
“We’re going to test something.”
“Like in a quiz?”
“Nope. There’s a machine that does the testing. All you do is lie down and watch a bunch of pretty lights.”
“You too?”
“No, just you this time. I already had my test, a long time ago.”
Concussion. I slipped on the ice six or seven years back.
“Did you pass?”
“Yep. And so will you.”
I’m trying to sound nonchalant but secretly I’m very worried about how this is all going to go down. For an MRI to work you’ve got to lie perfectly still -- not an easy thing to get a kid to do. The machine is noisy as hell and if you’re at all given to claustrophobia this will definitely bring it out in you. An MRI can be a scary creature.
I’m worried about how Lily’s going to take it. All sorts of scenarios flit through my head. Lily screaming, crying, banging on the tubing, refusing to lie down, scrambling off the table, hiding. Lily in tantrum.
I know how bad this can get. My first clear childhood memory is of me doing pretty much all of these things when faced with my first hypodermic needle. The doctor was not pleased. I doubt that a radiographer will be either.
Ignorance being bliss though, she doesn’t seem at all concerned. She’s gazing out the window at the cows and horses out to pasture, the corn stalks, the fields of soy and wheat. We pass a produce store, a used-car lot selling car-ports, the RoundUp Grocery and the River Winds Casino.
Yep, gambling and wheat fields, that’s us. There are any number of Indian-owned casinos out here, with names like Buffalo Run and Stables. They’re wildly outnumbered by the churches, of course.
But attendance-wise the smart money’s always on the Indians.
When we pull in to the parking lot of Baptist Regional Health
she’s singing along to the Kinks’ MISSING PERSONS.
She can remember these songs. But she can’t remember me.
We find our way to radiology and the room is packed. Almost entirely older people. I’m wondering if there’s an Early Bird Special on MRIs and CAT-scans these days.
A young woman in Admitting hands me a clipboard and a pen and we find a seat. While I’m filling out the papers Sam’s fidgeting, openly staring at all the people around her like she’s never seen this kind of crowd before. Fascinated, just short of rude. Across from us a skeletal white-haired woman smiles at her, a little flustered by being stared at you can tell, and Sam smiles back like this woman is her very best friend in the world. The woman hides inside her magazine.
“What’s that?”
She’s pointing to a guy about my age seated by the wall to our left, wearing overalls and work boots and cradling his right arm up into his chest. Luckily he’s talking to the woman beside him -- presumably his wife -- so he doesn’t notice.
“A sling. The man hurt his arm. But it’s not nice to point, Lily.”
“It’s pretty.”
She’s right. The sling’s a deep burgundy, some sort of paisley print.
“You’ve got one a lot like it. Only yours is blue.”
“I have a sling?”
“It’s a scarf. You make a sling out of a scarf. Normally you wear it around your neck. Or over your head.”
“Can you show me when we get home?”
“Sure.”
I finish the paperwork and bring it to the desk. Sam’s sort of baby-stepping along behind me. The woman in admitting smiles. “You can go right in,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
“They’re expecting you. Right through this door..”
I knew that Doc had clout but this is amazing.
I open the door for Sam and we’re greeted by the radiographer, a short slim guy in hospital scrubs who introduces himself as Curtis. First or last name, I don’t know.
“Mr. Burke. Lily. Right this way, please.”
Lily?
Samantha was what I wrote on the chart. Talk about greasing the skids. The Doctor has outdone himself this time. He leads us down a corridor and opens a door to our right.
Sam steps inside ahead of me and her eyes go wide.
“It’s all white!” she says.
Which it is. The whole room looks like it’s made of porcelain. Walls, scanner, scanner bed, chairs, stretcher, linens. Everything except a long wide window directly ahead of us -- Curtis’ monitoring station.
“Are you wearing any jewelry, Lily?” he asks.
“No.”
“What about the ring?”
“Oh, that.”
She tugs off her wedding ring and hands it to him.
“Good. Then all you have to do is lie down on your back here and relax.”
“She doesn’t have to change? No scrubs?”
“Nope. She’s good to go as-is.”
She hops up on the scanner bed. Curtis plumps her pillow. She lies down.
“It’s going to be a little noisy,” he says. “Want to listen to some music?”
She nods, smiles. He produces a pair of headphones.
White.
I hear faint muzak coming from them as she puts them on. Sam would have died.
“Would you like to stay, Mr. Burke?”
“I think I’d better, yes.”
I’m still apprehensive as to how she’s going to take this.
“Then I’ll need your watch and your ring. Anything else metal? Any change in your pockets?”
“No.”
I hand him the ring and the watch and he turns to Sam again.
“I’m going into that room now, Lily. I’ll be able to see you and talk to you and you can talk to me if you need to and I’ll hear you -- but only if you really, really need to, okay? Otherwise try be real quiet. Like pretend you’re sleeping. Try not to move at all, you know? Make believe you’re asleep.”
She nods again and smiles. This guy is pretty good.
He exits the room. I sit in a chair. A few moments later Sam begins to move. Head first into the belly of the beast.
She’s a fucking trooper.
Not a wiggle out of her. A half hour later we’re back in the car headed home. And our timing’s perfect because as we turn onto the driveway, the long clay road that cuts through our forest, there’s a UPS truck just ahead of us.
Or maybe it’s not perfect. The driver’s going to meet Lily.
Anyway, our toys are here.
The driver’s a woman of about forty who I‘ve never seen before, not our usual driver, very pretty even in her baseball cap and oversized drab brown uniform. ‘Mornin’, she says as she gets out of the truck and we both say ‘mornin’. She hauls open the back.
“I’ve got nine for you today, Mr. Burke, Miz Burke.”
“I’m Lily.”
“Glad to meet you, Lily.”
“What’re these?”
“We ordered them, remember? On the computer.”
“Toys!” she says.
The driver says nothing but it can’t possibly be lost on her that this is not the voice of your normal thirty-something woman. We help her unload. The silence is pretty thick except for Sam, who’s humming IT‘S NOT EASY BEING GREEN. And I can’t help it, I’m embarrassed for her. Or maybe for me, I’m not sure. Either way it sucks.
When we’ve got them all inside and I’ve signed for them the driver gives me a smile as she climbs back into the truck but she won’t meet my eyes.
“You have a good afternoon,” she says.
And I can almost hear her thinking she’s so pretty, too bad she’s retarded. And too bad for him too.
She pulls away. I almost want to throw something. But I don’t.
Lily wants to open every
thing right away but it’s way past lunchtime so I make us some tuna sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade and we take them outside to the old stone barbecue and eat at the wooden table there. The sun is glinting on the river. There’s the scent of earth and trees and grass growing. It’s a relaxing, Saturday-or-Sunday kind of thing to do and Sam and I have done it many times. But Lily just wolfs it down. She really wants at those packages.
“You remember this?” I ask her.
“Remember? ‘Member what?”
“This. Doing this. Us being here together.”
She shakes her head. “I never did.”
It seems to take forever but by the time I’ve got the animal hospital ready for surgery in the living room, the Easy Bake Oven alive and bake-ready in the kitchen, she’s already got the Once Upon A Monster video game running and Teddy and Abby Cadabby are having tea under the watchful eye of her new Baby Alive Doll.
That goddamn doll is spooky.
I figure I’ve got to log in some drawing time.
I work for maybe an hour, hour and a half but something’s wrong again. Now it’s Samantha herself who somehow seems to be eluding me on the page. She doesn’t look right. I’ve been drawing this woman for weeks now and know exactly who she is. Hell, I’ve even put her face and head back together after a shotgun blast.
So what’s my problem?
I go back through the first few pages and study her, then flip to today, go to the middle and flip again, back to the first few and flip to yesterday, back and forth until finally I’ve got it. She’s consistent until yesterday, when I had that difficulty with perspective. And today’s an extension of what I did yesterday. I’d have seen it then if I hadn’t been occupied with composition. It’s subtle but it’s apparent now.
Sam would have caught it in a minute. I try not to think how much I miss that.
Samantha’s gotten slightly slimmer. A little less heft to the breasts, a bit narrower in the hips and thighs. A little more like the real Sam.
More like Lily.
And I’m thinking well, what the hell, fuck it, I can fix that -- it’s ridiculous and annoying to have to do over the last three pages but it’s no big deal and god knows I’ve been preoccupied with the real Sam so that it’s no huge surprise that she’d have crept a bit into my work -- I’m thinking this when I hear a crash from the kitchen.
In the kitchen the scene would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. There’s Sam at the counter, hands raised in what looks like surrender, her eyes wide and mouth agape like she’s just seen a ghost scutter across the floor. Only what’s down there is a sodden paper napkin beside some buttery toweling, each of which is soaking up a mixture of what turns out to be flour, baking powder, vanilla, vegetable oil and round red sugar crystals. Barbie’s Pretty Pink Cake. Which is also all over the tail and haunches of my cat. She’s skulking toward the door.
I grab her before she can make her getaway and now it’s all over me too for chrissake.
I rush her to the sink.
“Jesus, Sam! What the hell…?”
“My elbow I hit it and it fell and she was there and I’m not Sam!”
“Okay you’re not Sam goddammit, but gimme a goddamn hand here. Turn on the tap, will you? Warm, please. Not hot.”
I can’t keep the edge out of my voice and I don’t try. What the hell was she thinking, doing this without me being here? My cat hates water unless she’s drinking it.
“Here. Hold her here. Around the shoulders.”
She does as I say and miraculously Zoey’s behaving so I tip a bit of dish detergent into my hands and rub it into a lather, rinse and do it again.
Then I go to work on my cat.
Zoey keeps giving me these disgusted looks until at last I’ve got her toweled dry and we set her free. Sam hasn’t said another word to me through the whole thing.
“Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you,” I tell her.
“I’m not Sam. You keep calling me Sam. Why?”
I have no good answer to that. At least none she’d understand.
“You remind me of somebody.”
“Who?”
“Somebody I know.”
“Is she nice?”
“Yes. Very nice.”
This is killing me.
“Let’s clean up this mess on the floor, okay?”
“Okay.”
At around eight that night I turn the sound off on a show about elephants on NATURE and pull out the photo album. We stopped taking photos a few years back for some reason, but there we are in the old days just after we met, Sam thirty and me twenty-eight in front of the Science Museum, taking in the fireworks at Carousel Park, down by the Falls, Sam on a bench in City Park, waving at me.
“She does look a lot like me,” she says.
I say nothing.
There are three pages of photos I took at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm back in our 2008 vacation and these seem to fascinate her. The crocks and turtles, the albino alligators, the wild bird rookery, the Komodo Dragon. She’s forgotten Sam entirely.
I turn to some of the older family photos. My mother and father, my brother Dan, her parents on her father‘s birthday. She doesn’t seem interested in these at all.
“They’re nice,” she says. “Can we watch the elephants?”
I’m awakened by Lily’s voice.
“Patrick? I’m scared.”
She’s turned on the light in the hall behind her and she’s standing in the doorway in her Curious George pajamas, hands and cheek pressed to the doorjamb like she’s hugging it. I’m still woozy from sleep but through the open window I can hear what’s bothering her.
Above the chirping of crickets, the wind’s whipping the howling and yipping of a pack of coyotes across the river. They’ll try to take cows down now and then over there and they tend to like to celebrate when they do. There seem to be a lot of them tonight, and the mix is eerie, from the long sonorous wolf-like wail of the adults to the staccato yip yip yip of the young. Which sounds for all the world like demented evil laughter.
Even the crickets sawing away in the darkness sound vaguely sinister tonight.
No wonder she’s scared. Even to my ears it’s spooky.
She looks so vulnerable standing there. Shoulders hunched, legs pulled tight together, her thumbnail pressed against her upper front teeth. More like a kid in some ways than I’ve yet seen her. So much less of Sam, so much more of Lily.
Almost like the daughter we’ll never have.
“It’s okay. It’s just a bunch of coyotes. They can’t hurt you. They’re way out there over across the river.”
“Patrick?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m scared.”
“I know you’re scared but you don’t have to be. To them it’s a kind of music, like singing, only because we’re not them, it sounds weird, a little scary. That‘s all.”
“Singing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Try to go back to sleep, Lily. They really can’t hurt you. Honest.”
“Can I…could I stay with you, Patrick?”
I want her to. I don’t want her to.
Contradictions slam together.
“You’ll be fine over there, Lily.”
“No I won’t.”
“Sure you will.”
“No I won’t. I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t wriggle around or anything. I promise.”
I can hear the tremble in her voice. Almost like a desperation there. She really is scared.
“Okay,” I tell her. I scoot over to the far side of the bed by the window. She scampers to the bed as though the floor’s on fire and hops in. Throws the light summer bedcovers over her shoulders and snuggles up next to me. She’s shaking.
It’s automatic. I put my arm around her and then her head is resting on my shoulder.
I haven’t done anything like this for days.
It makes me almost light-headed.
It�
�s as though this is Sam again, as always. As though nothing’s changed. But one thing reminds me that everything’s changed.
Her hair.
When Sam comes to bed and we hold one another close like this I’m always aware of the faint traces of shampoo in her hair, Herbal Essence or Aussie Mega. It’s a clean smell, as familiar to me as the scent of her breath or the feel of her skin beneath my hand.
Lily hasn’t shampooed today.
It’s not a bad smell, just flat and slightly musky. But it’s not Sam’s smell, not at all.
I’ll have to remind her in the morning. Shampoo your hair.
Meantime, if I close my eyes, the rest of her is Sam. My hand on her arm, her cheek on my shoulder, her leg against mine.
Lily keeps her promise. She doesn’t wriggle.
But it’s a long time before I’m able to sleep. And it isn’t the coyotes.
In my dream I’m telling somebody or other at somebody’s dinner table how extraordinary I think it is that I’ll die someday, just disappear tonight or tomorrow or whenever, and I’m wondering out loud just what will disappear along with me when I do. I awake with a raging hard-on tenting up the covers and a sense of puzzlement that one should somehow coincide with the other.
Mercifully Lily’s already up.
It makes no real sense and actually the thought’s briefly annoying but I’d rather she not see this. So I peer out into the hallway to make sure the coast is clear before I head for the bathroom. Then standing there peeing I wonder if she’s already seen it. It’s possible.
The call from Doc Richardson comes at nine-thirty.
“She tested out just fine, Patrick. Is she still…?”
“Yeah. She’s still Lily.”
I don’t know whether to be relieved or not. If it were a brain-thing it might be treatable. But then again…
He sighs. “Well, there’s nothing physically wrong with her. Everything looks perfectly normal. Have any other personalities appeared?”
“No.”
“And no sign of Sam at all, I assume.”
“None.”
“Then I think you need to have her see a therapist. I’m out of my league here. But I know a good one. Have you got a pen?”
I write down the woman’s name, address and phone number. I do it mostly for the doc’s sake. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to use the information. Call it pride or stubbornness -- I want to see this through on my own if I can. I’ll keep it by the phone as a last resort.