“It’s not too late.”
Sophia shook her head. “It’s different when you’re older.”
“You’re not old.”
“I always felt sorry for people who ate alone in restaurants. That was my mistake.”
Miranda was about to ask her mother what she meant when Darius came careening around the corner, both feet on the cart. “I found it next to the elevator,” he said happily. “Free!”
“You do like your bargains,” his wife observed dryly.
“It’s the little things in life.” He grabbed the duffel bag, moaning theatrically at its weight. “You don’t think they sell bricks in Alaska?”
“Ha, ha,” Miranda answered.
Sophia let herself relax. This was the best the family had gotten along in weeks, maybe months.
Inside the terminal Miranda was surprised that the line for Alaska Airlines consisted mainly of old people in windbreakers and white sneakers, all carrying aqua blue nylon bags with the words “Buccaneer Cruises” written in the shape of logs.
“You have a seat assignment?” Darius asked.
“A window.” Miranda nodded. “You really don’t have to stay.”
“As long as we’re under an hour, the parking garage costs the same,” Darius pointed out.
A beleaguered-looking woman wearing a Buccaneer Tours baseball cap arrived and asked all the “Buccaneers” to form a separate line to the left, leaving only Miranda on line.
“That was fast,” Sophia said, after the bags were taken away and the overweight fine (fifty dollars) was reluctantly paid by Darius.
“I guess I should probably get going.” Miranda looked at her watch.
“You’ve got an hour,” Sophia protested.
“It could take a while to get through security,” Miranda answered.
Sophia glanced at Darius in a sudden panic. What if something were to happen to Miranda? This could be the last time they ever saw her. They should wring every last moment they could out of her presence. “Let’s buy some magazines. My treat.”
“Mom, I’ve got enough to read.”
“Coffee, then,” she said too brightly, like a Buccaneer tour guide.
“Soph,” Darius put a hand on her shoulder.
“Oh, shit. All right.” Sophia shrugged. She knew when Darius thought she was being too emotional.
There were only a dozen people on line at the security checkpoint, but after a quick, hard hug from Darius and a more lingering one from Sophia, nobody suggested prolonging the good-bye. Miranda handed her driver ’s license to the security guard and kept her head down. If her parents were still watching, she didn’t want to see. All those years growing up, Miranda had taken her parents’ physical closeness for granted. When she was a child, their sexual energy had made her squirm with confused embarrassment, but it also reassured her. Something connected her mother and father. Now, standing with their arms angrily crossed over their chests, torsos leaning in opposite directions, they were like two negative ends of a magnet repelling each other, according to some irrefutable law of nature.
Miranda leaned her forehead against the scratched plastic window of the plane and looked down. Beneath her, a snow-covered mountain rose improbably out of a rosy nimbus of clouds. She checked her watch. They’d been in the air less than two hours. She turned to the pale young man next to her who had been reading a dog-eared copy of The Brothers Karamazov the entire flight. Whenever a passage seemed to strike him, he’d uncork a pen with his teeth and underline the words with a check in the margin. Normally, she would never talk to a stranger, especially one like him, but the newness of her adventure made her uncharacteristically bold.
“Do you know what mountain range this is?” she asked.
The young man craned his head over her body, first glancing at her chest. “Mount Hood,” he answered, letting his eyes rest on her breasts, as if they were old friends.
“Mmmm,” she answered, buttoning up the chartreuse cashmere cardigan she was wearing, one of Helen’s best. She hadn’t wanted to take it but her mother had insisted. “No reason to leave it for the moths.” Miranda had pretended not to see the tears in her mother’s eyes.
“First time to Alaska?” he asked, folding a corner of a page to mark his place and putting his book away.
“Yes,” she said, and nodded, alarmed by the disappearing book. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your reading.”
“Dostoyevsky.” He shook his head. “He’s like chocolate. Delicious. But you can’t eat too much.”
Miranda tried to hide her wince behind a smile. She’d spent her childhood among young men similarly enamored with their own love of literature. When Miranda was finally old enough to read the works her father’s graduate students talked about so lovingly, she’d felt like a frigid lover, unable to respond for fear of sounding like one of those pompous young men. It was one of the reasons she loved Jason. He liked to read. Andrew Marvell. He’s a poet. I know. But for him it was something pleasurable. Not an existential road map for the rest of her life. And certainly not a way to make a living. Miranda loved her father but she did sometimes feel there was something unseemingly soft about teaching literature for a living.
“Martin Lane.” The young man stuck out his hand and launched into his history without further prompting. He had work lined up on a Japanese fishing boat. Or he did, if the pollock were running. If the work was there, he could make enough money in three months to live the rest of the year in Los Angeles. If not, he could easily find construction work, though it paid less and was harder to do. “See all these blue-hairs?” He dropped his voice and looked around the cabin of the plane.
“Mmmm.” Miranda hoped nobody had heard him use the term.
“They’re all here to look at real estate.”
“Really?” Miranda asked, unconvinced. “I thought old people liked to retire to warm places.”
“Where else can you get oceanfront property for less than a hundred K?” Martin shrugged. “And pay no income tax. They come for the summer and leave for the winter. It can get up to ninety degrees in Ketchikan. The houses are for shit, though. After a couple of winters, most of them need to be torn down. That’s what happens when you leave five feet of snow on the roof all winter. What about you?” he asked, glancing at her breasts again.
“I’m going to live with my boyfriend.”
Martin looked disappointed. “Importing talent.”
“Sorry?”
“There are, like, no women in Alaska. And the good ones get taken fast. I tried to get my girlfriend to come one summer, but after two weeks, she was, like, ‘Yeah, Alaska, where the odds are good but the goods are odd.’ So most guys import their talent. Is he a fisherman?”
“Who?” Miranda was trying to decide if being called “talent” was an insult.
“Your boyfriend.”
“No.” She shook her head. “He’s a…” She hesitated. “A lumberjack.”
“Whoa.” Lane reared back and made a cross with his fingers. “Sleeping with the enemy.”
“What do you mean?” she said testily.
“I’m not an enviro-freak, but you see the way they whack those trees”—Martin made a karate-type gesture and a sound like a B–9 bomber—“it’s like a battlefield.”
“I see. It’s okay to fish the waters to the point of extinction but thinning the forest so they can make the books you read is a crime?”
Lane showed her the palms of his hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just saying your honey ain’t too popular among certain types.”
“Whatever.” Miranda lowered the shade, put on her headphones, and buttoned the cardigan all the way to her neck. Let him look at someone else’s tits.
23
sophia could tell from the fresh lemon smell in Helen’s room that Darius had been there recently. After reading a paper by a Swedish doctor theorizing that patients in comas could benefit from the sensory stimulation of strong tastes and loud noises, Darius had been squeezing fresh lemon on He
len’s tongue, playing the theme from the Magnificent Seven for her on a pair of expensive German headphones every day, and alternating a feather with sandpaper on her cheek. She supposed it didn’t do any harm, but she had seen a nurse rolling her eyes behind his back and had felt ashamed. Were they the crazy parents who couldn’t accept the obvious? Every day, the hospital asked if they had decided where to move Helen.
“Ayyy, eeee, aye, ohhhh, yewwww.”
Sophia cringed. As if to prod them to action, the hospital had recently moved another patient into the room. Only a thin polka-dot curtain hung from a built-in track on the ceiling separated Helen from a forty-two-year-old woman who had lapsed into a coma after a stroke caused by an overdose of diet pills. In the middle of a divorce, with no children, no parents, the woman had apparently eaten the pills until she passed out. If her ex-husband hadn’t found her when he showed up to borrow a ladder, she almost certainly would have died. As it was, she didn’t respond to any stimulus but, for reasons nobody could explain, she said the vowels over and over, like a record on an endless skip. A, E, I, O, U. The second Sophia heard them, her jaw began to clench with irritation.
She put a finger on Helen’s cheek. “Hello, sweetheart,” she whispered. After her initial awkwardness speaking to her, Sophia had settled on the childish endearments she had once lavished on the girls when they were little. By the time they’d become preteens, they’d begun to writhe in embarrassment whenever Sophia expressed any affection, but who could stop her now? She took Helen’s hand and held the back of it against her cheek. It never ceased to surprise her how Helen’s body continued to live, growing hair and fingernails, generating heat, pumping blood, all without any regard for the things that were generally believed to separate humans from animals—thought, language, memory.
“Your husband left half an hour ago.” Sophia jumped. Peggy had switched to a day shift to keep her nights free for a new boyfriend.
“Is Miss Irritable Vowel Syndrome still at it?” The nurse drew the curtain back.
Peggy had been so proud of her pun when she thought of it. Sophia had tried to play along but she couldn’t help seeing it as part of the general, free-floating contempt the nurses felt toward the bodies in their care. When she was around, they were gentle with Helen, carefully lifting her limbs, telling her what they were doing when they did it, just as the childcare books said to do with a baby. But Sophia saw how they treated patients who didn’t have family around. Like sacks of flour on a warehouse floor. She had no illusions that they treated Helen any differently when she was not there, nor was she unaware that her own squeamishness was a direct contradiction to her arguments with Darius. If Helen was brain dead, what did it matter if her skin was washed with laundry detergent or the expensive French lavender bars Sophia bought and insisted the nurses use for her sponge baths? Or if the catheter leaked or the sun was too bright or the ammonia smell of the mop was too strong?
After an hour, the vowels drove her out, to the grocery store, then home. Since Miranda had left, a week earlier, Darius had seemed even more distant than usual, but when she saw him sitting at the table in their kitchen, she felt a momentary flicker of relief. As long as he was home, they could work on their relationship. She began unloading groceries, waiting for him to say something. But the longer he stayed quiet, the more agitated she became. What right did he have to project his disappointment onto her? She shoved the grocery bags under the sink, noting regretfully that the time between coming home and wanting a drink was getting shorter and shorter. She went to the refrigerator.
“Why is there never any cold wine in this house?” she asked, hating the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. They made her sound pathetic, like somebody who needed a drink, which she did, but why advertise it? She poured a glass of vodka from a bottle in the freezer, a leftover from one of Darius’s graduate student parties. It poured viscous, like oil.
She sat down across from him. “What’s wrong?” she asked, more brusquely than she intended, aware that the liquor had begun to release the impatience that was now her constant companion.
“You drink too much,” he said.
Sophia looked at her drink. As the alcohol interacted with the ice, the water and vodka swirled together, creating a paisley pattern of clear on clear. “It’s true. I do. Sometimes, I even smoke. Last week, I parked in the handicap zone at the hospital. Are there any other faults of mine you feel like discussing?”
“You’ve given up hope on our daughter and I can’t forgive you for it.”
Something cold ran through Sophia. She thought of what her mother used to say about those shivers.
Somebody just walked on your grave.
I don’t have a grave.
Your future grave.
It had been inconceivable to the little girl that she would ever die. Not when a summer afternoon seemed to stretch on forever. Now death felt just around the corner.
“At least I didn’t drive our only living daughter away by being a total asshole,” Sophia answered. Darius’s face turned red. She had been thinking it ever since Miranda announced her plans but she had tried her best to keep the thought bottled up inside her. Darius, she knew, would not forgive her for saying it.
“I did not drive her away,” he answered coolly. “She made the decision to go on her own.”
“Because you were so cold to her when she didn’t want to set up camp twenty-four hours a day next to Helen’s deathbed.”
“Stop saying she’s dead.”
Sophia turned her head away from her husband’s raised voice. That was when she noticed the set of black nylon luggage she had given him a few years before piled in the hallway. She could still remember what she had written on the card. For all the trips we’ve yet to take.
“What is that?” she asked, her heart beating fast with a sudden rush of fear.
“I’m sorry,” he said, laying his hands flat on the table in front of him. “I can’t do this anymore. Not now at least. Maybe it made sense when Miranda was here, but now we’re hurting each other more than we’re helping.”
“You’re leaving?” Her brain and mouth were moving at the same speed. Thoughts needed saying right away.
“Steve Chen said I could stay with him until I find something.”
Steve was one of his graduate students, a brilliant first-generation Chinese immigrant who had broken his parents’ hearts by choosing literature.
“Are you sure?” Sophia asked, stalling for time.
“He has a pull-out couch, it will be fine.”
She supposed she should be grateful—she had a colleague who came home from work one day to find her husband had left, taking most of the furniture, the silver, and the cats with him. “It was the cats that killed me,” the woman liked to say, because it made people laugh, but Sophia suspected otherwise.
“If this is what you want.” She tried to affect an indifference she did not feel.
“We both know it’s more complicated than that.”
“‘Complicated’?” She raised an eyebrow. Darius blushed. When the girls first learned to ask why of every thing—Why is the sky blue? Why can’t I stay up late? Why can’t I have ice cream for breakfast?—they would answer, “It’s complicated.” Now it was just another bit of history blocking the driveway.
“I am going to move Helen in with me,” he said. “As soon as I get my own place.”
Sophia felt like one of those people who have been shot but couldn’t feel it. “You can’t do that,” she said.
“I’ve talked to some lawyers. I am a legal guardian.”
“I mean, you can’t do it by yourself.”
“You haven’t really left me a choice.” She heard bitterness in his voice. That was new.
“How will it work?” Her mind began to rush through the practicalities. Was she supposed to live in their big house alone? Could she afford to do that? Were they getting a divorce? What about Miranda? She felt an absurd desire to giggle. Her husband was leaving her
for another woman. Her daughter.
Darius stood. “Kelly said there’s room in the step-down facility at the hospital for at least a week.”
Step-down facility? At first, Darius had resisted the hospital’s jargon. Now he sounded like one of them. She watched as he bent over to pick up the luggage but did not offer to help. Monty, the dog, stood next to him, his tail working back and forth, like a metronome gone wild.
“What about Monty?” she asked.
“Steve’s apartment doesn’t take pets.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m sorry, Sophia, I can’t take the dog.”
“He loves you. You can’t abandon him.” She was pleased to see him blush.
“I’ll come get him when I can.”
“You’re going to break his heart.”
His upper body swayed like a tall tree in the wind. For a second, she thought he was going to lean over and kiss the top of her head, but then, suddenly, he was gone. Was that how a nineteen-year marriage ended? With the pneumatic phhht of the storm door closing? Monty lay next to the door whimpering. She finished the vodka, poured herself another, locked the doors, and went upstairs to lie down. In the sudden quiet of the house she noticed the same sounds she’d heard so acutely the night of the accident: The furnace rumbling on. The soft flutter of the clock as the numbers turned. The drone of insects in the yard. In the past, she had looked forward to the rare moments of being alone in the house. The delicious, snow-day feel of the empty house filled her with glee, and she had sometimes fantasized about a sudden, painless death for Darius so that she might live forever in that state. This was different. This was alone without end. This did not feel so good. The vodka, which usually eased her into a happy state of worrilessness, did not seem to be working. Instead of making things blur, it made her feel more awake, more alive than she had in years. Her foot jiggled nervously and her jaw clenched and unclenched. It reminded her of the one time she and Darius had tried cocaine in the early 1990s, after a graduate student had given Darius as a birthday present a small envelope filled with the white powder. She’d been shocked by the drug, which made her feel massively, uncharacteristically, competent, as if she were suddenly capable of cleaning the house, finishing her thesis and having sex with her husband on the living room couch all in one day. She only actually managed to do the latter and then couldn’t reach an orgasm but she’d seen enough of the drug to understand how easily it could exacerbate her feelings of unfulfilled potential. “Never again,” she said to Darius the next morning. “Agreed,” he’d answered.
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