Caminos

by Scott Walker

  At the end of this two-week, late-summer visit from Florida, Robert sat on the metal folding chair beside Virginia’s bed. She had eaten the entire plate of buttermilk biscuits and sausage gravy he brought her. Virginia despised the bland nursing home food. Bob Evans Restaurant’s biscuits and gravy was her favorite, and Robert always brought her an order when he was in town.

  “You go back tomorrow?” she asked suddenly as they watched the local news on the television at the foot of the bed.

  “I do, Granny. First thing in the morning.” The time had passed quickly. Too quickly. Robert was ready to be home and back to his solitary routine, but he already missed his grandmother.

  Virginia said nothing, as if she had not heard him. She returned her absent, melancholy gaze to the television. The oxygen tube snaked from her nostrils to a tap in the wall behind the mechanical hospital bed.

  An hour later, Robert stood and leaned over the high bedrail to tell her goodbye. He put his hand on hers, which was resting on her stomach atop the cotton blanket. “I need to go now, Granny. I work tonight, and I have to eat and nap a little before eleven.”

  “I know, Son,” she said. Her voice had gotten gravelly from the years of oxygen.

  Robert did not know why she had started calling him son recently, rather than Robby. But she had, and he liked it.

  Virginia began to cry. Robert was startled. He could not recall seeing her weep before. It made his heart ache.

  “I’m sorry, Son,” she said. “I know you have to go. I just miss you when you’re not here. That’s all.”

  Without thinking about the idea, which popped into his head unbidden, Robert said: “What if I move back here for a while, so we can see more of each other? Would you like that?”

  The tears still rolled from the corners of her eyes, but a smile spread slowly across Virginia’s face. “I’d like that very much.”

  Robert’s decision surprised him. Usually he agonized for weeks or months over such major changes in direction. He was terrified of making a wrong choice. And he had hated living in Huntington with a passion. The day he left for Charlottesville was one of the happiest in his life. Not once in the twelve years since had he thought for a second about moving back. He would rather have cut off an arm. But Virginia needed him, and he could not recall anything ever feeling so right.

  Robert kissed his grandmother on her damp cheek. “So, I’ll see you in about a month, okay? I love you, Granny.”

  “I love you too, Son.”

  She still was smiling, cherubic in the ugly little room, when he looked back at her from the hallway.

  * * *

  Every detail fell into place for Robert’s return. A week after he drove back to Florida, Tom called and said that a high school classmate of Robert’s, whom he had insured, was just completing renovations on an apartment building. He would rent Robert an apartment for as long as he needed. The owners of the condominium were sorry to see Robert go, but they waived the requirement of two-months’ notice, given the circumstances, and refunded his deposit early.

  Robert had left most of his possessions in a self-storage space in Arlington, Virginia when he moved to New Orleans, taking only as much as would fit in his Jeep. On his way to Huntington, he added the majority of what he had with him to his storage bin. He bought a comfortable chair which folded out into a bed, a wheeled table for his laptop, and a television. Otherwise, the apartment was empty. Sometimes he wished that a fire would consume all the things he had packed away in storage.

  As usual, sleep was not his friend. Working at night and struggling for rest during the day was too unnatural, and switching back to diurnal life at the weekends made it worse. After four or five fitful hours, he could make himself lie there no longer. Robert would drag himself from the fold-out bed, feed his old cat, and drive across the river to visit Virginia.

  They quickly established as pleasant a routine as possible. Robert brought her a café latte from Starbucks every time he visited. She loathed the nursing home’s watery, burnt coffee more than she hated the tasteless meals. And at least once a week, Robert brought biscuits and gravy from Bob Evans. Virginia always slurped the entire twelveounce coffee enthusiastically and ate every scrap of the food.

  They did not talk much. Robert was back, but Virginia was still depressed about her confinement. They spent most of his visits watching television and enjoying each other’s presence.

  As autumn faded into winter, Virginia drank less and less of the coffee and came to barely touch the food. In January, Robert stopped going to Bob Evans altogether. Often, he poured her coffee down the drain before he went home. But he could not bring himself to stop purchasing the coffee. It would acknowledge her decline too painfully.

  By the end of February, Virginia was absent more than she was present. If Robert was not working or fighting for some sleep, he sat at her bedside. Then he took off work and began rotating shifts with Brenda and Tom so she never was alone.

  Virginia’s breathing became labored. Three ragged, shallow breaths, then nothing for five seconds that felt like two minutes. Three ragged, shallow breaths, then the five seconds of silence, as if her body was undecided whether to battle on or surrender. Over and over. Occasionally, she opened her eyes, clearly afraid and confused, and tried to speak, but only grunts emerged from her clenched mouth.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Robert would say, squeezing her hand. “You can go now, Granny. It’s okay. We’ll miss you, but we’ll be fine. You’ve taken such good care of us.”

  “You should go home and get some sleep,” Brenda said just before twelve one night. “We’ll call you if anything changes.”

  Robert relented and hauled himself home. He slept poorly, despite the exhaustion, and woke at five. He showered, fed and pet the cat, and was dressing when his cell phone rang.

  Brenda’s voice was thick and choked. “She’s gone, Robert.”

  “When?” was all he could ask. It could not be. He had been away for only six hours.

  “Just a few minutes ago,” Brenda said. “Her breathing became smooth and even, and she didn’t wake up scared anymore.” She paused and sobbed. “Then she was gone.”

  His vision blurred by the tears, Robert raced through the empty streets at dawn. He did not know why he was hurrying. His grandmother was gone, but he needed to be there.

  Virginia’s forehead was still warm when he kissed her lightly, but her body was an empty shell. “Goodbye, Granny,” he said. He stroked her wispy white hair for the last time.

  They sat with her for half an hour, until the two aides came quietly into the room. The bearish young man with the thinning flattop and braided necklace towered over everyone else. He wiped away his tears and put one of his meaty hands on Brenda’s shoulder. “We need to prepare her now,” he said in a near whisper.

  “Yes, yes. Thank you,” Brenda said. She stood and took one more long look at the body of her mother lying on the hospital bed. “Oh, Tom,” she said and started to weep again. He held her close and walked her from the room.

  Robert left the nursing home through the service entrance. He had always parked on that side of the building when he came to visit. Virginia’s window faced that way, and he could peck on the glass and wave to her when he arrived and departed. When the automatic door opened, he saw the undertakers in their black suits pulling a stretcher bearing a purple velveteen body bag from the back of the hearse.

  * * *

  A week after they buried his grandmother, Robert had to put his beloved old cat to sleep. He had never felt so utterly alone.

  The year before, visiting a friend in Prague, Robert saw one of his graduate school professors, who was there for a conference. “Let me get this straight,” the jovially acerbic professor said after Robert told him about his job. “You can work anywhere you have an Internet connection, and in the U.S. you have to work all night. Why the hell have you not moved here?”

  Sitting on the one chair in his lifeless Huntington apartment,
Robert recalled that conversation and decided to go.

  Chapter 34

  Prague

  December 2008

  Robert turned forty less than a month after he moved to Prague, but he felt ten years younger and as if his life, in some amorphous, signficant way, had just begun. He spent most weekday afternoons at a cafe called Meduza, reading and drinking hoppy Czech beer among the hodgepodge of antique furnishings and walls covered with early-twentieth-century photos and lithographs in dark wooden frames. On the weekends, he spent countless hours revelling in the magical city, meandering the grey and white cobblestone sidewalks and feasting on the endless baroque architecture. It was like living in a dream.

  Robert and Marlene had arrived in Prague a day apart, though they did not meet for another six weeks. Robert noticed her on the first evening of the Czech class at Charles University. That wild mane of blonde curls and her ice-blue eyes. It was a course for expatriates of myriad professions and interests seeking some understanding of the ridiculously complicated language. Nothing about Czech resembled anything of their native tongues: Finnish, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, English. English was the lingua franca. It did not make learning Czech any easier, but it at least allowed them all to communicate.

  Clearly, Marlene was younger than he. All of them were. Robert turned forty the day before the course began and was pained to say it when—as part of the second-night exercise in the names of the numbers—the teacher went around the room asking the students their ages. The closest was a diplomat from Finland—thirty-two—and the youngest the fifteen-year-old son of an American businessman. Marlene was twenty-nine.

  They were paired for a conversation exercise for the first time a month into the class.

  “What time do you get up in the morning?” Marlene asked in Czech.

  “Four forty-five,” David replied. None of the numbers even sounded like numbers, and he recalled them and expelled them from his mouth with difficulty.

  “Four forty-five!” Marlene exclaimed, in English.

  Robert laughed and answered in English. “Yes, I know. It’s awful. I start work at five. But it’s much better than before I moved here. In the U.S., I had to start at eleven and work through the night.” He was amused by the mixture of horror and disbelief on Marlene’s face.

  “Only in America would that be possible,” she said.

  “Yes,” Robert agreed in a resigned sigh. “And what time do you get up in the morning?” he added in Czech.

  “Nine!” Marlene replied gleefully in Czech. She continued in English: “I could never force myself from the bed as early as you do. It is hard enough at nine.”

  Robert had been disappointed when the brief exercise ended but delighted by the several chances they had to chat during breaks and after the class over the next two months. On the Saturday night before the course ended, the students had gathered for dinner at Hlučna Samotá, a traditional Czech restaurant in the expat saturated Vinohrady neighborhood. Only the Dutch landscape architect with a Czech girlfriend had learned much of the language, but the class had bound them into a happy little social band.

  “Snow!” Marlene howled like a child when they emerged from the toasty restaurant into the freezing night. At least six inches had fallen during their long, loud repast, and fat, wet flakes still were streaming down.

  “Perfect!” the Finnish diplomat declared. “We certainly can’t call it a night already on such an evening. Who’s up for moving this party to the next location?”

  Most demurred. It already was past midnight, and they had consumed half-litre glass after half-litre glass of Czech pilsner over dinner and two rounds of shots of the gullet-burning plum liquor called slivovice to cap the meal.

  “I’m in,” Robert said. He had never felt so securely part of a sympathetic group as he did with this eclectic gang of expatriates. He had not passed on a single outing with them over the three months they had known each other.

  “Ahhh, we can always count on the New World,” said the bulky, redfaced Finn. “Who else will rise to the challenge? France?”

  “Non, non, non,” the French software engineer muttered as he rolled his usual post-dinner joint. “I was supposed to be home an hour ago.”

  “I’ll go, but just for a little time,” said the twenty-four-year-old Spanish embassy intern. “I’m meeting friends for brunch tomorrow, but not until eleven.”

  The others all gave their excuses and bade their farewells. Marlene lingered at the edge of the remaining few, looking undecided.

  “Come on, Marlene,” the Finn encouraged her. “It’s too early to go home, and it’s our last night before we all march off to our homelands for Christmas.”

  “Okay,” she said with a slight hesitation, and then: “Okay! Yes! Where should we go?”

  “Oh! Oh! I know,” the Finnish wife of the Finnish diplomat shouted. “I just read the other day about this new, authentic Japanese karaoke bar not far from here, and I’m dying to try it!”

  Her husband groaned. “God, no, not karaoke. Anything but karaoke. You’re with me on that, aren’t you?” he pleaded to Robert.

  Robert was unsure which position to declare. He felt more selfconfident among this group than he had with any other, but he still reflexively tried to adapt to the prevailing sentiment on the rare occasion a difference of opinion arose. It was a deep, hard old psychic condition to break. He adored both the Finns, and he did not want to alienate either of them. Before he chose a side, the Spanish intern and Marlene leapt in.

  “Some friends at the embassy went there last weekend said it’s great!”

  “I love karaoke!” Marlene said.

  “Well,” the Finnish diplomat said, looking in Robert’s direction. “We must keep the ladies happy. And I’m sure it’ll have slivovice. Karaoke it is.”

  They tromped giddily through the slushy snow, found the karaoke bar, and bounded down to their room. Round after round of slivovice. Round after round of bellowing along—microphones clutched in hand—to the lyrics scrolling down the fifty-inch flatscreen TV. At four o’clock, the Japanese waiter poked his head through the door and announced apologetically that they had fifteen minutes until closing time.

  Standing again in the cutting wind on the snowy sidewalk, the Finns and the Spanish intern called for taxis. Emboldened by the hours of Czech plum brandy, Robert turned to Marlene, offered his arm and said: “I don’t live too far from here. Do you want to come back?”

  “Okay, yes,” Marlene said after a moment’s consideration. They waved goodbye to the others and began slipping and sliding away, the Finnish diplomat grinning at them as they went.

  After the always fumbling and uncertain first-time sex, Robert and Marlene spent the next sixteen hours talking in his bed. At around four in the afternoon, as the winter night descended again over the gloomy, grey December Prague day, Marlene fetched paper and two pens from Robert’s desk. “Let’s play Stadt, Land, Fluss!”

  “What?” he asked, chuckling.

  “Stadt, Land, Fluss!” she reiterated.

  “Never heard of it,” Robert said as he pushed upright and gathered the down comforter around him.

  “How can that be?” Marlene squealed. “It’s the best game ever.” She explained the details: each player makes columns on his page and labels them city, country, river, and then whatever other topics they want such as books, movies, writers and actors; then they take turns calling out a letter of the alphabet and making an entry to each column as quickly as possible with a word starting with that letter.

  Robert generally disliked these sorts of games, but at this moment with Marlene—naked and radiant with her magnificent mane curling and cascading over her shoulders and half-way down her back—he would have gladly agreed to anything. They laughed and played until their pages were full, and Robert won by five when they calculated the points at the end. “Beginner’s luck,” he assured her.

  After a second, slightly less awkward go at sex, Robert had said as he held Marl
ene in the warm cocoon of the comforter and looked out the window at the black sky: “I haven’t spent the whole day in bed in ten years, and that was when I had the flu.”

  “The Americans,” Marlene had said, shaking her head. “We won’t wait that long to do it again.”

  Now they stood, a week later, amid the festive bustle of the Christmas market at Naměsti Miru. The frigid air was laced with the scent of baking Christmas pastries and mulled wine from the little wooden huts erected for the month around the square. Marlene slipped her hand into his jacket front and placed it flat on his chest over his heart. “I can feel the pain in you,” she said. Her voice carried a profound stillness.

  Robert had the sensation of a powerful current flowing between them: from his heart through her hand to her heart and back again.

  The red and beige tram rang its flat toned bell as it approached the Naměsi Miru stop. Marlene glanced away to the tram and then back to Robert. “I don’t want to go, but I have to.”

  “And I have to pack,” Robert said. He reached into his jacket front and took her hand. “I’ll only be gone three and a half weeks. I can’t wait to see you.”

  They kissed as the tram doors clanked open, and then Marlene dashed for the steps as the bell growled again. Robert stood in the cold wind, but did not feel it, as he watched the tram crawl away past the festive market huts, the garish Christmas tree, and the towering Gothic church at the back of the square.

  Chapter 35

  Berlin

  April 2012

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Marlene yelled at the top of her voice.

  Robert worried what the neighbors would think.

  They had moved from Prague to Berlin a year before, after Marlene finished her clinical internship, and they had lurched from one angst ridden, agonizing argument to the next. Robert had begun to think it would be better to die than keep living like this.