Edge

by Michael Cadnum

  We could both tell that Dr. Monrovia was working up to something without being sure how to go on. I had the feeling that with most families he would simply talk, stop talking, and leave.

  “The spinal cord is involved,” he said.

  A nurse padded across the tile floor, wearing white shoes with white soles, a tanned woman as tall as Dr. Monrovia. He turned his head and listened to her whisper, and gave a nod.

  “You can go in and see him now,” he said. “Both of you.”

  This sounded like good news, but the way he said it made me pause. Something had changed. My father’s condition was not the same as it had been. We could all go see him because it didn’t matter if there was one visitor or three.

  TEN

  Sofia met me at the door. Her eyes looked smaller than usual, her face without makeup, so she looked even younger than she was, reduced to a little, bare core of herself.

  I had always seen her through my mother’s eyes, a minor-league temptress and not very bright, one of my father’s lab assistants when he was doing work on the internal structures of the killer bee. “Bee gonads,” my mother had exclaimed. “This woman is an expert on bee dicks.”

  “I was thinking about calling the housekeeper,” Sofia was saying, keeping her voice quiet. “I wondered if I should tell her to bring Daniel.” She meant more than she was saying. Her mascara-free eyes reminded me of fragile living creatures, parameciums, transparent beings light would kill.

  I turned around to consult with my mother, but she was standing off to one side, giving Sofia a civil smile, but not wanting to break into our conversation. Sofia folded her arms and allowed herself a moment of gazing at my mother, and I wondered what Sofia saw in the first Mrs. Madison, what hard feelings Sofia experienced herself. We had all avoided being in the same room together.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” said Sofia to my mother, to both of us.

  This was not necessarily the right thing to say. It implied that we were here to assist Sofia in her difficult hour. My mother ran her fingers through her thick red hair, considering. I braced myself inwardly. It was impossible to tell by the half smile on my mother’s face what she about to say to the young woman she called Ms. Tits.

  “I’m glad we can help,” said my mother, and I was warm inside, proud of her, as though she had just performed a very difficult anthem, high notes almost no one could hit. But the tension in my mother’s face made her look like someone just back from the dentist, jaw numb.

  It was impossible that we should be standing there uttering words like normal people on just another night. I had the feeling that both women were taking strength from me.

  I was stalling, not wanting to look closely at what lay beyond us in the room. Besides, for perhaps the first time I saw my father’s second wife in my own way, without my mother’s own shadows-and-fog lighting. I had never seen Sofia so beautiful. She couldn’t talk just now, leaning into me. I looked past her toward the bed, unable to see very well, not wanting to wait any longer, impatient to be with my father.

  “What have you told Daniel?” my mother asked.

  “I told him Daddy was hurt,” said Sofia, standing a little more erect, challenging us to say that she had said the wrong thing.

  There was nothing to see, just bright red digits, numbers on various pieces of equipment. The room was dark. But then, as I entered, it was not so dark after all.

  I thought it was a mistake. I knew otherwise, but a part of my brain flashed the signal: Wrong. Wrong room. Wrong man.

  In the bed lay a drowned, shriveled creature. His body was the homing place of colored and transparent tubes, a machine wheezing, alarm signals going off without any particular urgency, a steady mweep mweep nurses hurried in to silence.

  A woman in a San Francisco Police Department uniform stepped from the shadows. “I want to have a long talk with you,” my mother said, her voice hoarse with feeling. I could hear the challenge in her voice, but she was delaying that moment when she stood beside my father.

  “You should wait to speak with Detective Unruh,” said the cop.

  Straps held my father. His neck was captured by large white absorbent pads, his head held firm. His face was puffed into a Halloween joke by a white air tube. It looked like my father was committing some embarrassing sex act, fellatio with a robot, something he was doing for laughs: How’s this for grotesque, Zachary. A tube was stuck into his nose, white tape crisscrossing his face. His hair stuck out all over a flat, white pillow.

  He was naked under a thin brown blanket, exposed down to his navel, and beyond, skinnier than I had expected. The skin of his chest and much of his face was slathered with a brown-yellow stain, and it would have been easy to believe that this was not my father at all, but some derelict they had stuck full of shunts and tubes and hooked to a machine.

  “Dad?” I said, like someone just coming home, announcing himself to an empty house. I didn’t think it was right for us all to crowd in, so much like a deathbed scene it might frighten him.

  A machine somewhere picked up its pace, my father breathing faster or his heart pumping harder. A nurse nudged me aside, adjusting a tube. “He hears you,” said my mother.

  I turned to her and gestured: you talk. Maybe I felt my silence would be as reassuring as anything I could say, forestalling any panic he might feel.

  Mom shook her head, a little sadly. Then, like someone about to step to the edge of a high dive, stepping to the edge, stepping off, she said, “I’m here, too, Teddy. We’re all here.” I wasn’t sure this would reassure him, three key people in his life standing around with so much to say they could barely talk.

  A nurse met my glance as she unhooked a tube and fired a syringe into the small round end of the plastic coil.

  A very tall, deep-chested man with skin as dark as espresso was consulting with Dr. Monrovia. When he saw us making our way down the corridor the tall man left the doctor and hurried our way.

  His hand was warm, a ridge of callouses where you get them lugging suitcases or lifting weights. He introduced himself as Detective Unruh.

  Un-rue. The name didn’t make sense to me, and so he spelled it out loud, a man used to doing this, patient with us. “I want you to know my heart goes out to you,” he said.

  My mother took a deep breath, and I was sure she was going to lose control, something about his calm authority shaking her. Left with nothing to manage she would pace, fumble for the phone in her purse, call wrong numbers, swear at whoever answered, and end up experiencing her quiet form of disintegration—chew her nails, lose weight, lace on running shoes and run for miles. I had seen it a few years ago during the divorce. On the outside she played along, a peaceful exchange of legal paperwork. Inside, in a part she hated to acknowledge and probably wished didn’t exist, she was on fire.

  “If there is anything I can do for each one of you,” he said, in a deep, resonant voice. He looked too calm to be a detective, not suspicious enough, commanding but kind. He reminded me of Mr. Euclid, the principal of Hoover High, a man with a series of business suits in varying shades of black, off-black, charcoal black, a man who would not suspend three juniors for nearly drowning a sophomore in the B-wing lavatory.

  “What are you going to do?” a voice said.

  It was me, my mouth. I hated the way the detective put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You want to know who did this,” said the detective.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “You want to know who did this to your father, and what are we going to do about it.” He took his hand away from me and decided to address his comments to Sofia. “You want us to offer reassurance that everything is being done.”

  Sofia nodded, like someone hearing a foreign language and almost catching the drift. My mother turned away and stared at the wall, and only Sofia gazed at him, half reassured by what she was hearing in the detective’s voice.

  “I need a list of the valuables he was carrying on his person,” said the detective.r />
  “We’ll call the credit card companies,” my mother said, almost eagerly—something to do.

  “And an estimate as to how much cash,” said the detective, squaring away to look at me.

  “You found his wallet,” I said.

  “We did,” said the detective.

  I imagined the empty wallet, thin, a residual flabbiness because of all the credit cards someone had emptied—museum memberships, Beverages and More discount cards, American Express. My dad loved seeing his name on things.

  ELEVEN

  I did what Mom told me to do, leaving her in a motel and driving across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, the traffic a mess. Crews were laboring to re-engineer the bridge and enable it to survive an earthquake of 8.0 or higher on the Richter scale. This meant they had to close off lanes of traffic and stand talking while huge cranes waited, cocked and unmoving. Every time anyone tried to cross the bridge, it was the same—unpredictable. It had been a minor miracle that Rhonda had gotten me to the hospital as quickly as she had, and Mom said she wanted to be close to the hospital and not have to face the bridge if Something Happened.

  When I was a little boy I would sit in the car parked in front of the house and pretend to drive. The imaginary landscape outside the car was forest, jungle, desert. The car was an armored personnel carrier, a drift of desert dust in the rearview mirror, dazzling the enemy.

  Sometimes even now I liked sitting in front of the house, windows rolled all the way up, listening to the Volvo 960’s sound system. The stereo had been paid for by a loan broker as a Christmas present, before Mom wore him out with her twenty-four-hour-a-day personality. But today I didn’t listen to any music. I sat in the file-cabinet-gray car in the silence, not wanting to go into the empty house.

  I unlocked the front door and turned on lights throughout the house, every one I passed, side lamps, floor lamps, even the lamp on the hood over the stove.

  I called the hospital. A recording said that all available lines were busy. Don’t think, I warned myself. Just do one thing after another, a smart zombie. When a human female spoke to me, I identified my father as Theodore Madison, the way his name appeared on the cover of his books.

  It was a little annoying, this role of my mother’s, Field Marshall to the World; But tonight I took some comfort in doing what she told me. It made me feel less stunned as I stood watering her crookneck squash, yellow grenades among the wandering vines. Her chives luxuriated in the darkness like fine green grass. And don’t forget the pumpkins, she had cautioned, the green gourds sullen beneath the claw-shaped leaves, months away from becoming jack-o’-lanterns. And the star of the show, the tomatoes; I couldn’t forget them.

  Mom and I both share a joy in gardening, but her approach is all inspiration and impulse, a hole for her chili pepper plant gouged out of the middle of the lawn, the shriveled green jalapenos abundant but out of place. Her vegetables thrived in messy rows, stuck too closely together, ropy tomato vines struggling out of a tub, green and yellow bell peppers wrestling for space. My beans were neat, long, slender stakes, each bean plant extending gracefully, climbing toward sun.

  The lights from the house glittered on the water from the garden hose, the smell of the wet earth rising around me. I turned the water off tight and wound the hose into loops, the way my dad had shown me years before, “so it’s ready when you need it.”

  I dragged a suitcase from the closet, a big gray top-of-the-line Samsonite with little brass padlocks on the zipper tabs and wheels on the bottom. She had checked the items off on her smart pink fingernails. Bras, two. Panties, two. That was easy, my mom’s underclothes.

  The rest would be tricky. She had asked for a sweater vest, the one she wore around the house, an ethnic-look Greek thing, something she wore when she trowled the dirt in her herb garden. Whatever else I brought I was supposed to remember the slip-ons she had custom made in Lahaina. She was not dressing for appearance.

  I stuffed it all into the suitcase and then took it all out again and folded it as carefully as I knew how. Then I leaned against her dresser. She carried a makeup kit wherever she went, but she needed a little tube of medicine in case she got cold sores, which she always did under stress. She needed a container of saline solution for her contact lenses, in case the squeeze tube of Sensitive Eyes she always carried sprang a leak.

  “And don’t forget my glasses, in the top right-hand drawer,” in case her contacts fell out of her eyes and got lost. And Ban roll-on, unscented, from the medicine cabinet. “And anything else you know I’ll need.” I found the little silver cross from her nightstand, the one her Aunt Dot had worn during the London Blitz, when a five-hundred pound bomb blew the roof off a church across the street.

  I thought I heard a masculine cough in the background, a television laugh track. Ice tinkled in a drink. Rhonda has a set of cocktail glasses she picked up at the Alameda Flea Market, handpainted antique highball glasses, palm leaves, poodles.

  I must have said something, because she was adding, “He was on the news. Channel Two. It wasn’t the lead-off story. An Amtrak train ran over some people in Santa Maria, and that space probe they finally got to work. But I kept watching and there it was, Bay author shot.”

  My voice was able to get the question out, although the sound was strange, a talking dog.

  “No suspects,” she answered my question, a sad dash of irony in her voice, mock anchorman.

  The television sound went off at that instant, somebody—maybe one of her boyfriends—listening in the distance, wondering who she was talking to.

  Bea was at the front door, a tapping I could barely hear.

  She looked up at me in the porch light. Somehow it was important, what she would say now, the words she would choose. The screen door was between us, a new door, replaced a few weeks before, a sheen of silver.

  She had a red bandanna tied over her head, Bea the pirate. I opened the screen door to let her in and had to put my hand out to the wall, unsteady. She leaned against me and kept me there, gently pinned to the wall.

  “There’s no change in his condition,” I said, repeating what the hospital voice had told me.

  She nodded, her bandanna pressed against my chest as though she had foreseen this. For a while silence protected us. “They didn’t come tonight,” she said at last.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  But one of us had to talk, just to keep time moving along. That was how it seemed: that our actions, our words, were tiny but essential.

  She looked up at me, trying to read my thoughts. “The Oil-Towners. They stayed home.”

  All of that seemed so long ago, something that had happened to someone else. I was glad to hear about it. It was something solid to consider, a historic event that could be weighed and argued.

  “Maybe, when they had a chance to think, they realized that it wasn’t fun any more,” she suggested, like someone offering a tentative theory on the collapse of the French Revolution.

  I nodded, trying to think about what she was saying. Bea and I had once been very close, but I had felt distant from her lately. Now I felt grateful for her—not just for her companionship but for her odd, puzzling personality and for the fact that I didn’t have to get to know her, like the doctor, the detective, all these strangers who were suddenly so important.

  “I want you to tell your father something,” she said. She had never met my father, although she had seen him at a distance, hurrying to his car.

  I must have stared down at her with some tension in my eyes, in my body. Bea was close to saying something rash, something that could change our luck.

  “Tell him that reading Prehistoric Future made me cry,” she said. “Especially at the end,” she said. I didn’t want her to continue, but she did. “When he said that even if there were no human beings, life would still be a miracle.”

  TWELVE

  I found a place to park the Volvo all the way out on the street. The parking lot was full of cars with out-of-state
licenses, New Jersey, Iowa.

  The Golden Gate Motel on outer Geary was maybe a mile from the hospital, and it had a coffee shop and a swimming pool, heads tossing in the water like cabbages. The bleach odor of the pool drifted all the way across the parking lot, along with the sound of someone pretending to drown, spluttering, thrashing. The pool closed at ten, according to the rules under NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY. It was nearly eleven.

  Mom was on the phone in the motel room, nodding approval as her suitcase rattled in behind me on its swivel wheels.

  She hung up and said, “Dr. Monrovia ate lunch at the White House last month.”

  The people in the swimming pool were having a party, everyone drowning, spluttering back to life. “That’s good news,” I said. My voice was tense, fake-confident, but I managed to sound more or less like myself. “Dad could wake up to see the president bending over him. Should be very reassuring.”

  “Dr. Monrovia is very prominent,” she said.

  For an intelligent person, my mother falls for clichés. I have actually heard her refer to a real estate lawyer as “powerful and well-to-do.”

  “I called the American Express toll-free 800 number,” she said. “They were very helpful,” she said, almost dreamily.

  “How about the other cards?”

  “I took care of all of them. Even the Chevron card.”

  “Is there any news from the hospital?”

  She didn’t answer me directly, putting the white-and-green Golden Gate Motel pencil right next to the notepad, as though neatness was all that mattered. Then she tilted her head and let her eyes flick towards me: no news.

  Bodies splashed, voices called, giggles, shouts.

  “What did you find out about Detective Unruh?”

  “I’m not worried about the detective,” she said, taking a deep breath now and then, like someone battling hiccups, a sort of instinctive breathing exercise to calm herself down. “Did you pack my floss?”