by Sands Hall
“It’s shaped like a ball,” Maud told him as she slid the book into a large canvas bag. “Or a circle, really. But it’s called a light. Tell Jake where your eye is.”
Theo pointed. “Eye. Nose.”
“That’s Jake,” Maud said.
“Dake.”
Again Sam’s fingers moved within Jake’s.
“Which play?” With a thumb Jake smoothed the wrinkled skin. “Not that I’d know. Except Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet.”
“Twelfth Night.” Maud manipulated Theo’s arms into the sleeves of an impossibly small parka. “I’m even getting paid. In L.A.”—she said these two syllables with an odd, quote-marked emphasis around them—“most of the time you act for free. ‘Showcases,’ they’re called.”
“Same thing in the music world.” He was hit with memory. Dark clubs, tables ringing a postage-stamp-sized stage, air thick with smoke. Guitars glittering blue and silver, women in white heeled boots. All those free performances offered up in hope that Producer X or Record Label Owner Y would be in the audience and grab you. Grab your song. “I’ll walk you to your car.” He leaned over Sam. “I’ll be right back.”
Sam’s eyes slitted open. “Not the circus.” His smile was a rictus.
“Just to my car. See you tomorrow.” Maud bent over Sam. His arms went up, shaky, circled her neck.
Jake looked away from this and found Theo staring at him. Chin pulled in, lips pursed, brow furrowed. “Hey, Theo. Don’t look at me that way. I’m a nice guy.”
Maud tucked her hair into a large front-brimmed cap. She looked like an urchin. “I was telling Sam I’m not sure why, after all this time and agony, I still want to be an actor.”
“The moon falls down,” Sam said, or something like it, followed by a string of syllables. Because it seemed appropriate, Jake nodded. Maud said, “He’ll be right back.”
As they left the room Maud handed him Theo. “You carry him.” Theo came into his arms, gazed at him, suspicious, then squirmed, looking at everything they passed. Machines blinking red, green, blue, yellow lights. Half-open, darkened doorways. A woman moving her walker, then her feet. Patients in wheelchairs staring into space. Jake, carrying Theo, realized that those they passed would assume he and Maud and Theo were a family. Amazing what the actual, complicated relationship was.
Beside him, Maud took an audible breath.
Coming towards them were Sara and the fellow in the cowboy hat who’d been talking to the receptionist. Maud moved behind Jake, pulling at her cap.
“Is that Maud?” Sara paused. “I didn’t know you were here. You leaving already, Jake?”
“I’ll be back,” Jake said. “Just walking Maud out.”
“Maud?” The man with Sara squinted suddenly.
Maud had drifted to the opposite side of Jake. She put out a hand. “Hey, Driver.”
Sara said, “You know each other?”
“It is just so amazing to see you.” Maud’s so hit a high note. She smiled without showing her teeth. Skin above her cheekbones flaring red. “This is Driver. I met him when I was driving here. He was hitchhiking. I gave him a ride.” She flushed, if possible, an even brighter red.
Jake shook his hand. “Interesting name. We know someone named Jeep.”
“It’s that kind of a world.” Driver stared at Theo with a kind of boggle-eyed amazement.
“Where is that that sister of yours?” Sara said. “She should be here.”
“Ah, Lizzie. The teacher.” Driver nodded.
Theo patted Jake’s arm. “Ah wa ma wa wa ma.”
“Theo’s right.” Maud put a finger out for Theo to wrap a fist around. “We should go.”
“Sara knows how to get hold of me,” Driver said. “You should do that, looks like.”
Maud raised her eyebrows. “Should I?” She held her arms out for Theo, who tumbled into them, talking.
“I’ll be back,” Jake said to Sara.
They stood in silence at the elevators. Eyes on the changing floor numbers. “Well, that looked intense,” Jake finally said.
Maud burst out laughing. First time she’d reminded him, forcibly, of Lizzie. “I probably don’t need to tell you some boffing went on there, some rogering.” She sighed. “Odd as it was—and it was odd—I’m very grateful to the powers that be for that encounter.” She didn’t elaborate.
They left the hospital. She handed Theo to Jake, pulled a tiny hat out of her pocket, snugged it down over Theo’s ears. Jake blinked against the onslaught of sun, reflected off patches of snow, roofs of automobiles. Maud unlocked her car, dumped her book bag into the passenger seat, squinted up at the hospital windows. “We should get Sam out into this, cold as it is.” Closed her eyes to the sun. Jake studied the lines around her eyes. Some delicate as cracks in a china plate, others radiating like a sunburst. “Funny how getting cast in this play makes me feel I belong here.”
“Box.” Theo bounced and pointed. Jake was aware of an ever-growing drag on his forearm. Wondered how Lizzie did it, holding Theo on her hip for hours, even cooking at the same time. “Box?” Jake repeated.
“Do you have a minute?” Maud asked. “He likes to play in the sandbox.”
“It’s freezing.”
“He likes it. Just for a few minutes. Then I’ll take him back out to Lizzie’s.”
Lizzie’s name invoked a silence. Maud got a plastic pail and shovel out of the car. They climbed a slope of iced-over earth and dirty frozen slush that led to a swing set, slides, an enormous green plastic turtle surrounded by trampled snow. “Plonk him down in there.”
“Box!” Theo said happily.
“It’s not a box,” Jake said. “It’s a turtle. A turtle with some very cold insides.”
Theo waved a shovel at him and spoke at length. “We have it on good authority,” Maud said when Jake looked at her, “that this is a sand turtle.”
“No matter. It looks cold and hard and unpleasant.” They watched Theo dig. “Tell me about your play.”
“I think I’d gotten so used to not getting work that I’m still a little stunned.” Strands amidst Maud’s black hair glinted red. Jake was pleased to witness Lizzie there. “You give an audition all you’ve got, and when you get home you look for that little blinking light on your machine that might be good news. But it’s your agent saying, ‘Not this time, hon.’ You have to live with yourself afterward, pump yourself back up to size, explain to yourself: ‘It isn’t you, you’re just not what they’re looking for.’ Your agent says, ‘They went blonde with the role, hon.’ Or ‘They went black with the role.’ ”
“They say that? They do that?”
“Once they went male with the role!” They both laughed. “Or they tell you—this is a direct quote —‘She’s wistful but not pallid, Maud, so don’t go bouncing in there.’ So you tone down the energy, even though it’s been drummed into your head that’s what you must take with you into an audition, and they call to say, ‘You just didn’t have quite enough energy.’ They say, ‘You weren’t classy enough’ or ‘You were a little too classy’ or ‘You’re just not pretty enough, you’re not sexy enough.’ ”
“They tell you those things?”
“Once I even got ‘You were just too pretty, hon.’ That’s when I decided agents have this list taped to their desk. They’re talking to a client. They close their eyes and point—” She demonstrated.
Jake nodded. “Put out by Pick-an-Excuse, Inc.”
“Patent pending.” Maud looked towards the hospital, intent, as if she could see through walls and windows. “I’ll always be grateful to Driver. It took him to snip the umbilical cord that held me to Hollywood.”
“Randy, the bass player in my band? Wanted to know why you’d come here.”
“Why on earth! On bad days I think I’ve jumped out of the frying pan of Hollywood into the fire of the Red Garter. Talk about creating your own reality. Now I’m a time-travel Playboy bunny. How is that any different from what I was doing in La-La land?”
; “She wondered if you miss L.A.” He made his own questions belong to Randy.
“Some things.” They watched Theo squat by his pail, sifting sand into it. “Probably like you miss Nashville?”
Observant of her. “As you say. Some things. But I was sick of sending songs out to people who didn’t want them. Or wanted to change them so I didn’t recognize them.”
“Look what they’ve done to my song, Ma.”
“And then there were drugs, especially cocaine, which made me feel smart while I was snorting it, and really stupid the next day. Add whiskey and women—it’s like all those country-western songs. Some great people. But I had to get away.” He looked up, at a tree with bare branches, at a contrail feathering out in the sky. “And then I went back. You probably know why.”
He didn’t look at her. After a pause she nodded.
“And now I’m here again.”
Theo shoveled sand with vigor. Maud said, “The other day I read that Theodore means loved by God. Gift of God. Something like that.”
“Theo.” Jake tried the name.
Theo waved his shovel. “No! No home.”
“As in theo-logy,” Maud said. “Study of.”
“Theo-sophy.”
“Theo-centric. Do you think Lizzie knew that when she named him?”
Jake pondered this. “With Lizzie you can’t know.”
Maud’s laugh was a guffaw. “Exactly what I thought. I doubt she’d tell me. If I asked.”
Jake kicked at a pile of dirty snow.
“She can be frustrating,” Maud said. “And I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“I called today, asked her to visit Sam with me. But I just got her machine.”
“She’s being very weird about Sam. But she’s always been weird about loss. About losing.” Maud knelt beside Theo.
“No home!”
Jake wanted to explore this piece of information he’d just been given. Maud would know! Maud could tell him. But she was dusting sand from Theo’s hands, explaining all the reasons it was time to go. Protesting, then resigned, Theo insisted on keeping his shovel as she hoisted him onto a hip.
This is why women have hips, Jake thought, following with the bucket, watching her negotiate the slope down to the sidewalk. To have something those legs, that diapered rear end, could perch upon. The discovery was vast, undeniable. Usually a thought of this magnitude forced its way, sooner or later, into a song.
Hip, lip, trip, his mind began.
Ship. A harbor one came home to?
Maud handed him Theo, opened the car door. He lowered Theo into the car seat, bumping the little head on the edge of the door, struggling to figure out how the various straps worked. Theo stayed good-humored, even helpful. “Juice,” he said, and let the shovel out of his tiny grasp only when he realized he could not hold on to it and his bottle too.
“He’ll be asleep as soon as we start driving,” Maud said. “You should do that. Ask Lizzie if you can take him to the park, and then drive him around while he naps. Sometimes I think I’m going to get into an accident. I’m always adjusting the rearview mirror so I can see his face instead of keeping my eyes on the road. Sorry. I’m babbling a lot.”
“Not babbling.” Jake liked standing here with her in the all-too-rare March sun. “By the way,” he said. “I thought of some more words to add to the entry Roget’s missed.”
Maud looked confused.
“Bop,” Jake said. “I heard it the other day.”
Maud’s face cleared. “I thought of some others too. Going at it. Not to mention intercourse.” Jake made a face and she smiled. “Yes, I thought so too, until I started to think about all the ramifications of the word course. Then it’s not so bad.”
Water coursing down a mountain. A skier, alternating shoulders, slaloming through poles. Jake nodded.
Maud adjusted the rearview mirror. “I don’t really stare at him the whole time I’m driving. But look at him.”
Theo, blissful, sucked away at his bottle.
“Would you like to have a beer sometime?”
Maud looked at him, surprised, then wary. The glow she’d begun to exude faded away.
Jake gave the top of her car a little slap. “Tell me what to say to Sam.”
“I babble. As I have to you today. Or I read to him. He doesn’t say much. Sometimes his sentences start okay. Then he gets confused and trails off. You heard him. Usually you can figure out what he’s trying to say. But sometimes he opens his eyes and fixes you with a look.” She clicked the key back and forth in the ignition. “Sometimes I think a heart attack is about a broken heart, or maybe a tired heart. And cancer is loneliness that’s eating away the core of a person.”
“Or anger,” Jake said, thinking of his father, who’d died of colon cancer. And of his mother, who’d had a breast removed before she died. Jake had never told anyone he thought his father’s alternating rages and silences had sucked her insides right out, had dehydrated her love until her heart was dry as sawdust. Another song he’d started. Never gotten past what might have been the hook, or the first line. he sucked the heart right out of her, he might have done the same to me
“But I can’t quite get what a stroke would be. It has to do with a blood clot in the brain. But the word implies being hit. Something you need to attend to? A mechanism that’s frozen up in midstroke? That’s been abandoned? He’s lost the use of half his body.” Her eyes were dark.
She turned the engine on. “I told Jeep I’d have Theo back by three, and I’d better go prep the talk I’m supposed to give to the cast tonight: ‘Speaking Shakespeare.’ ” She put the title in ironic quotes, distancing herself from the thing she could be proud of. Lizzie did this too. About her painting, about her teaching. Irritating quality.
He held up his arm until the car disappeared around a corner of the park. Headed back to the hospital, zipping and unzipping his leather jacket. Lizzie carrying Theo around the kitchen, fixing dinner. Maud hoisting him out of the sandbox.
lip
ship
trip
He tried some lazy rhymes too:
sit
fit
“Ad-lib,” he tried, then “Shit.”
Impossible. Like the song about his father he’d never finished. But on his way back up in the elevator he kept trying to wrap his mind around a rhyme, an image, a way to slip towards the unexpected, unpredicted beauty of a child on a woman’s hip.
A nurse stood next to Sam’s bed. Turned as Jake came in, as if she’d been waiting for him. Sara and Driver stood on the other side of the bed. Driver had his arms folded.
“I must tell you!” the nurse said. Hair drawn tightly towards her white paper cap. Eyes stretched, elongated. “I advise against this in the strongest possible terms. He needs to be monitored very carefully. He’s not eating. He’s been put on medications—”
“We’ll take the meds with us.”
Driver was handsome, Jake had to admit, in a surly way. Long hair, jutting nose, black eyes. He looked from Driver to the nurse. “What’s going on?”
“We’re next of kin. We have papers that prove it.”
Jake realized where this might be heading. Where the hell was Lizzie? “Next of kin?”
The nurse held up her hands. “Please understand. I’m not disputing their right. I’m disputing the wisdom.”
“Bitter Water clan,” Driver said.
“I put a notice in the paper on the Rez, see,” Sara said. As if that explained anything.
Sam’s eyes were closed. How much of this was he was hearing, did he understand? Jake felt his own jaw tighten.
“It isn’t right,” the nurse insisted. “He needs to be where we can take care of him.”
“You’ve been saying that for over a week,” Sara said. “More. He isn’t any better.”
“He’s better off dying out there, in the living air,” Driver said, “than here, where he’s breathing death, in, out, in, out, every minute of every day.”
>
The nurse looked stricken. Sara put out a hand. “He’s not talking just to you—”
“She works here.”
“—but death is in this air,” Sara continued. “It’s not the best medicine. Not for Sam.”
Jake had a sudden, absurd image of his mother’s Reader’s Digest: “Laughter, the Best Medicine.” “What about Lizzie?” he said. “Lizzie needs to be consulted.”
“Lizzie has abdicated.” Driver’s tone made Jake want to slug him. “Where is she? Sara’s been here almost every day. I’ve come three times. Where’s Lizzie?”
Sara did not meet Jake’s eyes. “Once,” Sara said. “She has been here once.”
“I’m sure there are reasons,” Jake said.
Driver folded his arms, a particularly irritating pose.
“She cares. She cares too much. Sara, you know how she is.” Maud had just said it. She’s weird about loss, losing.
Sara bent her head. “I’ve tried to explain that.”
Arms still folded, Driver said, “Interesting way of showing care.”
Jake sat beside Sam. Took his hand. “What do you want?”
Sam’s eyes slitted open. “Home.”
“Where are you taking him?” Jake was troubled that Sara looked so troubled.
“Home.” Driver put an edge on the word.
A pinched-faced intern made his way through the curtains surrounding Sam. Driver seemed to know this was about papers. He handed over multiple forms.
“The hospital can not nor will not be culpable,” the intern said.
“I’ve told them,” the nurse said, weary.
“He couldn’t get much worse now, could he?” Fluorescent lighting accentuated a cluster of pockmarks on Driver’s cheek. “What are they doing, these men in white who get paid a million dollars to come through once a day, scribble something unreadable on a chart? Doctors are your gods, drugs another. Money another. Hospitals are where you sacrifice to these deities—”
Sam muttered something. Sara, examining a computer printout, looked up. “Driver. Okay, now.”
“And who really benefits?” Driver finished. “Not the ones who are sick.”