by Sands Hall
“That’s not altogether true,” the nurse protested.
Sara held out the bill. “Two hundred and fifty-six dollars for a foam pad?”
The nurse sighed. “He might get bedsores.”
“Two hundred and fifty-six dollars?” Driver seized the bill. “What’s it actually cost? Five? And who’s getting the surplus on that? Not you. Certainly not me. Not Sam.”
“He gets to take it home with him.”
This sentence balanced in the air, nosedived towards the floor. The nurse and the intern exchanged a look. Driver shook the bill at them. “Maybe you started in this work because you care. But you have been sucked into this maze.”
Sam’s hand was cold inside Jake’s. Now and again his fingers twitched. Jake cleared his throat. “So where are you planning to take this mattress pad? Not to Lizzie’s, I gather. Sam’s trailer?”
Sara had her mouth pulled down at the corners. “This is a bad business.”
Jake held out his hand for the bill. It was horrifyingly large. Sam, he was sure, had no insurance. “Who’s paying this?”
“Send it to this address.” Driver pulled a card out of the pocket of his fringed coat, handed it to the nurse. “The government taketh away, and the government giveth.”
The intern maneuvered a gurney next to Sam’s bed. “You all need to vacate while we get him loaded up.”
“Now hold on just a second.” Jake’s forehead felt bunched and knotted. “Lizzie needs a chance to— Lizzie has to know before this goes any further.”
Sara pulled him out of the room. Behind them curtains swished shut. “We’re taking him to the Rez,” she said. “To my cousin’s sister, Maggie. He’ll be closer to his own.”
“This isn’t right, Sara! That isn’t his home. Those aren’t his people! You’re his people, and Lizzie is. Summer. This will kill him.” He took hold of her upper arm, too hard.
Sara looked away. “But where’s she been?”
Jake shook her arm. “Do you want it to be this way, Sara? Do you think this is right?”
Driver spoke from behind Jake. “Lizzie’s not clan.”
Again Jake wanted to punch him. “Of course she is. The girls practically call him Dad.”
“We’re the ones came and got him out.” Driver’s eyes were hard and black.
“Speak of the devil,” Sara said.
“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Lizzie sang, halfway down the hall. Black jeans under a bulky parka made her legs look tiny. “Just got your message, Jake. And here I am!” She hugged Sara, smiled at Driver. “Good to see you again, Sara’s mother’s-sister’s-cousin.”
Silence. Jake heard the beeps of medical equipment in the perpetual twilight of the rooms that surrounded them. Lizzie looked from Sara to Jake, put out a hand. “I never did get your name the other day?”
“Driver.” He did not take the proffered hand. Lizzie pulled back, eyebrows raised. Flicked a look at Jake.
The intern wheeled the gurney into the corridor. Sam’s body a narrow mound beneath a pastel blanket.
“Hey, Sam.” Lizzie stepped forward. “You getting some tests done?”
Sam’s eyelids fluttered.
“They’re taking Sam out of the hospital.” Jake kept his eyes somewhere to the side of Lizzie’s face.
“How did you do that!” Lizzie’s eyes glittered. Jake could not read her face. “I should have known you’d get this handled, Sara! I was coming to ask about it today. And I thought it would be so complicated!”
“Well, sure,” Sara began.
“Not sure,” Driver said.
“Maybe, Driver, we should—”
“Maybe we should not.”
Lizzie looked like a confused puppy. Checking their faces for the bone that was being hidden by one of them.
“You never visited him.” Driver had his arms folded again. “Sara tells me he lived on your property and you never visited him. And even while he was here, sick and old and maybe dying—”
“What are you talking about?”
Sara made a sound like air escaping from a tire. Sam rolled his head back and forth. Down the hallway, a nurse taught an emaciated young man how to use a metal walker. “Move, balance, step,” Jake heard the nurse say. “The balance there in between is important.”
“What are they talking about, Jake?”
He cleared his throat. “What does Sam mean when he says ‘home’? That’s the important thing.”
“Move, balance, step.”
Sara gazed off, down the hall, away from Lizzie.
“Bitter Water clan.” Driver shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked back on those silly heeled boots. “He should come to his people.”
Jake wished they weren’t in a hospital, so he could yell at Driver the obscenities the asshole deserved.
“But we are his people.” Lizzie sounded puzzled.
Sara nodded. “Sure, we thought of that.”
“What do you mean, you thought of it?”
“That’s where he got sick,” Driver said.
“He got sick because his dog died.” Lizzie’s voice was loud. “And what the fuck do you know, anyway?”
“He got sick because he was lonely. Sara’s told me how often you visited.”
“Summer went up there every day!”
Driver’s nod was insolent. “Some company that is.”
“She’s good company, Driver,” Sara said. “That’s not the point. He’s been lonely, Lizzie. We’ve discussed how he is. He needs to know he has family. I’ve thought about this a long time, about what is right.” Sara looked miserable.
“What is right!” Lizzie cried.
“We’re taking him to his people.”
Driver had a real knack. For the third time in twenty minutes Jake wanted to knock him down. He took a deep breath. “Lizzie and her children are Sam’s people.”
“Clan, then,” Driver said. “Tribe. It’s a different thing. He needs to be near those of his own blood.”
“Blood?” Lizzie’s eyes were wide.
“If he’s going to die soon—”
“He’s not.”
Only once in the three years they’d been together had Jake seen Lizzie cry. That twisted mouth. Swiping tears from her cheeks. His chest ached. He had never felt more helpless.
“But if he does, he should know he has these things,” Sara said. “That he comes from these things.”
“He has us. Please, Sara.”
Driver gestured to the slack-jawed intern. Began to walk towards the elevators. With a glance at Lizzie, the intern set the gurney in motion.
Lizzie turned a stricken, awful face to Jake, then ran to catch up. Walked beside the gurney, touching Sam’s face, his hand. “Sam. Tell them no.”
The intern, looking scared and young, cleared his throat again and again. Jake wondered if he should lie down in front of the gurney, chain himself to it. As if reading this thought, Lizzie ran ahead of them, put her hands out to bring the gurney to a stop. The people in wheelchairs at the sides of the corridors watched in astonishment. “Now you stop this,” Lizzie said. Jake could see she was trying to bring her voice under control. “You can’t do this.”
“But we can,” Driver said. “The papers are signed.”
The doors of the elevator slid open. The intern, looking embarrassed, turned the gurney so that he was pulling instead of pushing it. Lizzie, holding on, was pulled into the elevator with them.
Sara put a hand on her shoulder. “You need to let go, Lizzie.”
Lizzie stumbled backwards out of the elevator. Reached blindly for Jake’s arm. “What am I supposed to do?” Shaking. Mouth twisted. “Oh, Jake, what are we going to do?”
CHAPTER 25
LIZZIE
NOTES FROM BENEATH THE MAGNETS OF LIZZIE’S FRIDGE
HINTS FROM HELOISE
UNEXPECTED GUESTS?
In a big laundry basket, stash anything that doesn’t belong in the rooms where the guests will be. Hide it in the bedro
om closet.
Kid’s room a mess? Close the door!
Dishes in the sink? Load them into a plastic dishpan and stow it in the oven.
Lizzie was pondering the cord of wood Bud had dumped outside the house when Maud’s white Toyota bumped its way up the driveway. Leaving the engine running, Maud got out of her car, her face white beneath her urchin cap. “Where did Sara and Driver take Sam?”
Lizzie pulled on a pair of work gloves. “Who is that asshole, anyway? Jake says you know him.”
“Where did they take Sam?”
“You planning to go fetch him?”
Maud’s nostrils were white-edged. Her stare was furious. Lizzie kicked the pile of logs. “I’ve got to teach this afternoon. Help me get this out of my driveway before it snows again.”
Maud turned her engine off. In the storeroom next to the kitchen Lizzie found her a pair of Sparky’s work gloves. They didn’t speak for some time. Maud tossed the split logs up the flight of stairs, Lizzie piled them under the eaves. Maud was clearly struggling with what she needed to say, and Lizzie found herself glad that verbose Maud was wordless. What would Maud have done against that asshole who’d appeared out of nowhere to lay claim to Sam? How would she have dealt with Sara, who with smiles and pretended wisdom—you need to let go—had pulled Sam from her life?
“And I thought I’d never see him again,” Maud said suddenly. It took Lizzie a moment to realize she was not talking about Sam. “Have you called Sara?”
“If you’re so goddamn interested, why don’t you call Mr. Asshole yourself?” Lizzie dropped a log on the pile, kicked it into place. “They were taking him to Sara’s cousin’s sister’s place. Or something.”
Maud blew a sibilant breath and began to pitch wood again. Lizzie wished the lecture would just start and be over. She’d been teaching. She’d been busy with the girls and Theo. She’d grown too accustomed to the work Sam did around the place, ordering and stacking wood, getting the storm windows up, making sure the pipes wouldn’t freeze, checking the roof, gutters, insulation, and other details so myriad she didn’t even know what they were. So the gutters had filled with leaves and overflowed, disastrously. She’d had to order another cord of wood in the middle of winter. Summer’s school kept calling her in for conferences. She had to teach, prep, grade. She had no time. Not like Maud, with her piano playing and theater. No kids to bog her down.
“Let’s switch. That way I can practice both tossing and stacking.” Maud’s voice was irritating, falsely bright.
“This doesn’t take practice.”
“Everything is a practice.” That bright, cheery voice. “Interesting word, really. Violin players and dancers practice. But lawyers and doctors have a practice.”
Lizzie uttered a soundless groan, kicked another log into place.
“So maybe the idea behind the word is that you can find what you need to know about life—even your experience of life—in each action you do. Practice. Catch.”
In spite of herself, Lizzie felt the heft of log through her leather glove, smelled a faint aroma of resin. But she said, “For God’s sake, Maud. It’s just something you do.”
Maud threw another log, hard. “I’m trying here, Lizard. I’m freaked about Sam. I’m afraid he’s going to die. But you have an electric fence around you on that subject. So I’m trying not to talk about it. Give me, as you would say, a fucking break.”
They tossed and caught, stacked and piled in silence. Lizzie assumed Maud was pondering practice, her tedious practice of making everything-be-a-metaphor-of-everything-else. Wood, the catching and stacking of wood, its goddamn relevance to her life, to Lizzie’s life, to Sam’s life. Logs. Source of heat. Came from trees. Trees lived, logs burned, which meant trees died. There was something in that. She imagined ashes blowing up out of the chimney, settling over the land to be turned into new growing things. Death into life. But that led to wondering where on the Reservation Sam might be. She moved her mind back to wood, the way one used to move a needle on a record player past a song one didn’t want to hear. There was tossing. And stacking. She liked stacking better. Was that significant? Maud would find a way to have it be. Fitting things together? Lizzie, trying to wrap her mind around the concept, grew tired.
Maud, false-bright again: “Someday, when I have a house with a fireplace, I’ll have practiced how to throw and stack wood, and I’ll be ready.”
Lizzie shoved a log into place. “So now we get poor Maud’s litany of how she doesn’t have anything and I do. How her art is so intangible and mine isn’t. How I have kids and she doesn’t. How I make fucking greeting cards for a living, while she performs Shakespeare.”
Maud dropped her gloves and the piece of wood she was holding onto the ground and walked to her car.
“I’ll give you Sara’s fucking phone number,” Lizzie called after her. “You can do what you want with it.”
Maud opened her car door, stopped. “Sometimes I think you just hate the fact I moved here.”
“Bullshit.” Lizzie yanked her own gloves off, slapped them hard against her jeans.
“And I’m so grateful I had you to come to. But you seem so mad at me. All the time.”
“I’m not.”
“Mad at something. And I don’t quite understand why you should be mad at me.”
Except that you’ve taken over my life, Lizzie thought but did not say.
Maud stared into the distance, clearly making a decision. She closed the car door. “Did you know that Jeep’s seeing Rich again?”
“She better not be.”
“I think she is. From things she’s said. Here. You toss. Let me catch for a while.”
Even as she was grateful Maud was staying, Lizzie resented her being magnanimous. The wedges of pale wood arced through the air. When they were done, Lizzie fetched the broom to sweep the stairs. “I’ll do it.” Maud closed her hand over hers on the broom handle.
Lizzie tried to get her hand out from beneath Maud’s, but Maud held it there. For the first time in a long time Lizzie was aware that Maud was the older sister. “What?”
“I ran into Jake. At the hospital yesterday.”
“Really.”
“While I was visiting Sam. He walked me to my car. We talked a little. Theo played in the sandbox.”
Quite the little family. Lizzie resisted saying this out loud.
“He mentioned our having a beer sometime.” Maud began to sweep. Her hair swung forward, obscuring her face. “This seems rather unmonumental now, with Sam gone, but yesterday I felt very weird. I thought I should talk to you.”
“Why on earth?”
“I just thought, I don’t know, that you should know.”
“Why on earth? I’ve only not had anything to do with him for, like, two years.”
“Okay, fine.” Maud handed her the broom. “I came to tell you that. I thought it was the right thing to do. And to find out where Driver is. You don’t have to bite my head off.” She headed down the stairs and got into her car, then proffered a pile of mail out the window. “I picked up your mail on the way in. Letter from Mom. I got one too.”
Lizzie reached for the letter on top of the pile of magazines, catalogues, bills. Their mother’s neat handwriting decorated the back flap, postmarked Oxford, England.
“They’re coming.”
“Here?”
“For the opening. Of the play.” Maud carefully did not say “my opening” or “my play.” Lizzie used a fingernail to slit open the thin flaps of the aerogram. She scanned the letter, read aloud:
. . . so glad to think of you girls together. Your father is a bit worried about Maud’s shift in career aspirations, but we are delighted she’s found Shakespeare of all things in that town of yours.
“That town of mine,” Lizzie said, shaking her head.
“You should hear them on the subject of Hollywood.”
She’s always been so good at theatre; television is just a sacrifice of her talents. I don’t know how she’l
l make any money, or actually maintain the career she’s been trying to create for so long, but after all those sad years in that dreadful Hollywood, we hope she is happy.
“See what I mean?”
She writes glowingly of all the help you’ve given her. Your father and I are very touched at your generosity and enthusiasm in sharing your lovely life with her.
Lizzie looked up. “My lovely life.”
“It is lovely, Lizard.”
Lizzie shook her head, went back to reading aloud.
We need to come back and sort out the Seattle house before we leave again, this time for Singapore. We thought we’d use it as an excuse to come see you! Maud will be doing her show and we’ll have a chance to see your new paintings and the kids. We haven’t seen Theo since he was three months old! I still carry that wonderful card you sent us for your gallery opening in Santa Fe last year.
“They didn’t come for my ‘show,’ ” Lizzie said.
“I know.”
Your father is working hard, as always. Most days I seldom see him until dinner, but I’m happy enough browsing through bookstores and having tea and scones or sherry and chocolate digestives at little shoppes around town. Sometimes he meets me for a half pint at a pub. I try to get him to play darts but so far he’s refused . . .
“They’ve never come here. But now they come to see you in a play.” Lizzie wondered at the sense of hard fury that came over her whenever she imagined her parents coming to visit. She had moved away from them so that they wouldn’t be able to pass their judgments on her life, her house, her children, her furniture, her dishes. Her father galled—his word—by the abundance of progeny—again, his words—and the lack of marriage. When he saw the trailer she could imagine what he’d say—“You call this a studio?”
“They never visited me either. They hate Hollywood. Dad’s embarrassed by my acting. He told me I should have been a scholar, that I was wasting my time and my intelligence.”
“At least you do Shakespeare. Not like Southwest Ink.” She saw Jeep’s car coming up the drive. “I’m late. I’ve got class. Sara’s number is in my address book on the counter in the kitchen. Under Roantree.” She ran upstairs. Only after she’d stepped into the shower did she realize that things might be a little awkward between Rich’s ex- and current lovers. But she did not go back down to facilitate.