Gaelan plans to support Mr. Fraser’s efforts by proposing several changes to the KHAM-KLAN weather graphics when he returns from his leave of absence. He’s confident that his viewing audience will not only embrace the use of spheres and hamburger buns as symbols, they’ll welcome the accurate scientific knowledge.
The phone rings.
“Gaelan, you’ve got to get down here now.” It’s Bonnie. Her voice sounds strained and congested, as if she’s been crying. “There’s something wrong with Viney.”
“What is it?”
“It’s hard to describe, but she’s acting really strange.” Bonnie fills him in on the details; Gaelan tells her he’ll be there as soon as possible.
In case he has to spend the night, he throws a couple of things into his gym bag. He fills the cats’ food and water dishes. No time for coffee, so he fills the bathroom sink and splashes cold water his face. He’s barely aware of the fact that he performs all these actions with the use of his right arm and hand only: from shoulder to elbow, his left arm stays glued to his lower ribs; the left side of his torso remains practically immobile, as if contained in a body cast.
He pulls the plug from the basin and rushes out before observing a scientifically impossible occurrence: The spiraling water empties into the drain in a clockwise manner.
It’s after midnight when he arrives. The meds are already starting to wear off; the pain in his shoulder is starting to fire up again.
A wet snow is falling hard. Bethan stands on the front porch, an afghan wrapped around her shoulders. Eli is inside, peering through partially opened curtains, looking over the back of Viney’s sofa.
“She’s in the backyard,” Bethan says, pushing the door open for Gaelan as he comes up the porch steps. “Bonnie’s with her. Let’s go through the house.”
Inside, Eli is now standing at attention. “Hello,” he says.
“Hello,” Gaelan replies.
“Wait here, will you, honey?” Bethan calls over her shoulder as they pass through the living room. Eli frowns but does as he’s told.
They make their way toward the back of the house. “So what happened exactly?” Gaelan asks.
“Bonnie called her this morning—I guess she checks in with her every day—and when she didn’t get an answer after several tries, she got worried. Haley couldn’t get away because of her kids, so Bonnie came over and found Viney outside, like this.”
“In the snow.”
“No hat, no coat, no gloves.”
“This was when?”
“Right before she called you, I think. Around ten-fifteen.”
They arrive in the family room addition at the rear of the house, where sliding doors lead onto a concrete patio. The motion-detector lights are on, sending a harsh light out toward the backyard, casting the falling snow in relief against the black night beyond. The snowflakes are falling in perfectly parallel, vertical lines, as if chasing one another down to the earth, sliding on a construct of invisible threads.
“Bonnie asked me to come over, thinking I could figure out what’s going on,” Bethan continues, “but I can’t do any kind of exam in the state she’s in. She’s not answering questions, and we can’t get her to come inside.”
Gaelan draws closer to the sliding door.
“At least she let us put a coat over her,” Bethan says. “You see them?”
He pushes the heavy door to one side and steps out onto the patio. Even under the eaves, the wet snow is falling so hard that he can feel it rebounding off the concrete, striking at his feet and ankles, dampening the cuffs of his khakis. He squints into the backyard. It feels colder to him now, but maybe it’s the strangeness of the scene that chills him.
At the very edges of the light, where it starts to diffuse, about fifty feet from the patio, there are two figures: The falling flakes make them look like newsreel figures, rendered in grainy tones of black and white. One figure is kneeling with her back to him; the other hovers nearby, holding a large umbrella.
“She’s been out there for a couple of hours that we know of, maybe even longer,” Bethan says, joining him outside. “She’s not herself, Gae, there’s something really wrong, but without looking at a CT I don’t know a thing. We need to get her up to the hospital.”
“She’s crying,” Gaelan says, half to himself.
“How can you tell?”
He continues to stare at Viney. “Bonnie said she was asking for me?”
“Every time we try to get her inside, she says she’s not going anywhere ‘until my boy gets here.’ We figured that had to be you.”
“How is she?” Eli has joined them and stands just inside the house.
“Oh, honey,” Bethan says, putting an arm around him. “I’m sorry about this. You’re such a trooper. I just didn’t feel right about leaving you alone at home.”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Eli says, shying out of her embrace. He turns to Gaelan. “What are you going to do? How are you going to get her to come in?”
“I don’t know,” Gaelan says.
“Oh,” Eli says. He seems disappointed. “Well, maybe you’ll figure it out once you get there.”
Putting up the hood of his coat and making his way out to the garden, Gaelan wonders why a few words from this twelve-year-old boy should have such an armoring effect, and why making a success of his task matters so much more because of Eli’s presence.
As soon as he’s close enough to see her face, he knows he was right: Viney—who rarely cries and, when she does, gives the impression that everything in her body is telling her not to—is kneeling in the snow, in the strawberry bed, shivering, muttering, weeping. There’s a coat thrown over her shoulders; her legs are bare and, along with her shoes, covered in snow and mud.
Bonnie stands over her; when she sees Gaelan approach she gives him a sad, scared smile; she’s been crying, too. She’s holding Dad’s big green and white golf umbrella, adjusting it with precision each time Viney shifts her position so that it remains over her. It’s a kind but useless gesture; Viney must have been out here long enough before Bonnie arrived to get soaked to the bone.
Gaelan reaches down and lightly touches the top of her head. “Hi, Viney.”
“Oh honey!” she cries. She gets to her feet and hugs him, mud and all. He flinches with pain but doesn’t pull away. “I’m so glad to see you! There’s so much work to be done here.” Before Gaelan can restrain her, she kneels again and pats the soggy earth next to her as if it were a sofa cushion. “Come on. Help me.” She starts digging again.
He kneels beside her. “What’s the matter, Viney?” Her eyes are glazed; she has an energy that is both manic and diffuse.
“Nothing’s the matter, sweetie, nothing! I’m just behind is all. I haven’t kept this bed up like I should.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve let these runners get too far from the mother plant. These runners. These runners …”
Gaelan looks toward Bonnie. Her face is creased with concern.
“Come on, honey,” Viney insists, grabbing his wrists, sending another electrical current of pain into his shoulder. “Help me!”
“But how can I help, Viney? What can I do?”
“Dig, sweetie, that’s all. Just dig! Like this. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve done a terrible thing, you know, letting it all go like this.”
She resumes digging, but Gaelan senses that she’s wearing down, giving over to the exhaustion, and he realizes that perhaps he doesn’t have to do anything but simply be here. His physical presence—and whatever it means to Viney—is enough. Saying the right words is not required.
“A highness sin,” she mumbles after a while. “Horrible and highness. And now there is punishment.”
Gaelan looks to Bonnie for clarification. Bonnie shrugs and shakes her head. When he turns back to Viney, she has stopped digging and is staring fixedly at her muddied hands, her body rigidly still. He has the feeling that her heart is beating too fast, like a small creature t
hat’s only narrowly escaped being roadkill, or is hiding from some looming predator. “Viney?” he says.
She does not answer. She is crying again.
He picks her up—tiny as she is, the action makes his shoulder feels as though it’s being ripped apart—and carries her inside.
“Oh, honey,” she repeats, “I’m so glad you’re here.” Her body relaxes into his; her limbs go limp.
As he brings her into the kitchen, one of her mud-splattered shoes falls onto the floor: It’s a golf shoe. One of Dad’s.
* * *
Viney rallies for a while after they get her cleaned up. They settle her in the backseat of Gaelan’s car with pillows and layers of blankets, and then start off for Lincoln, Gaelan in his car, Bethan following in hers. Bonnie will stay behind and look after Eli.
For the first few miles, Viney remains awake and chatty.
“I should have known that those runners would get away from me,” she says. It’s not clear whether she’s talking to him or to herself.
“You just can’t keep things hemmed in like that, not forever,” she continues. “Welly and I should have figured that out, and now that S.O.B. has left me with the whole damned mess and not a word of direction, not a bit of guidance. Isn’t that typical? Isn’t that just like a man?” She goes on like that for a while, but eventually she wears down and by the time they pull up to the Emergency Room entrance, she’s fallen asleep.
Ignoring his body’s last desperate entreaties—because no one else can do this, it’s his responsibility, his weight—Gaelan hoists Viney out of the backseat and transfers her to a wheelchair. The pain now is nauseating; he has to steady himself against the wheelchair for a moment before taking her inside.
Bethan is already standing at the triage desk and describing Viney’s symptoms—disoriented, manic, verbally confused, possibly hallucinogenic, jittery—and ordering a CT. She requests that the on-call neuroradiologist notify her for a consult when the results are back. A hospital orderly transfers Viney to a gurney and wheels her away. Bethan and Gaelan take a seat.
None of the other people in the waiting room appear to be in any acute distress, medical or otherwise, so in most cases Gaelan can’t tell if they’re to be seen by a doctor themselves or are awaiting news of someone else:
A middle-aged, heavily made-up woman in an overly tight, hot pink jogging outfit is dozing in one of the chairs (something about her makes Gaelan suspect that she’s drunk); an exhausted-looking man and woman pass a cranky toddler back and forth, trying to get him interested in watching a Disney video; three men who look like they might be father and sons—but who are completely ignoring one another—sit on a sofa, all are enormously overweight and wearing grimy overalls; and a pale, emaciated girl in the corner appears to be holding a shaggy, languishing, long-haired pet, but when Gaelan looks closer he sees that there’s someone sitting next to her with his head in her lap. They form a disconcerting tableaux—both of them so skeletal, their bodies in such odd relationship with each other. It’s as if the boy’s bones are internally unbound and completely unstable, and it is only the force of the girl’s embrace that keeps him from splaying apart, a loosed bunch of pickup sticks. The girl leans down, whispers something in his ear, and then kisses his filthy-looking head with great tenderness.
Gaelan catches Bethan looking at them, too. She’s wearing glasses and her hair is pulled back into a sloppy ponytail. He realizes that they haven’t been alone together for sixteen years.
“Thanks for being here,” he says. It seems like a harmless enough introit.
“I want to tell you about my marriage,” she replies, still staring at the sad pair of lovers.
Gaelan has the sensation that a sudden upsurging geographical event is occurring within his torso, tectonic plates crashing together to form a ragged mountain range. “What?”
Bethan turns her eyes to him. “My marriage,” she repeats. “My husband, Leo. Can I tell you about him? Not tonight, maybe, but sometime?”
“Hey!” someone calls. It’s one of the trio of men in overalls. “Aren’t you that guy from TV? The weatherman?”
It is not always a major event or decision that stands as a signpost, and it is a wise person indeed who recognizes that small moments, too—such as this one, set in a hospital waiting room in Lincoln, Nebraska—can afford a choice between two possible and very different versions of the future. Gaelan sees clearly that the portals to these two possible futures will be opened through the use of two words: yes and no.
In one version, he has never been so grateful for the way his on-screen appearance aligns with his up-close-and-personal one: Yes, he says, yes, I’m the weatherman. This future has him spending the next several minutes chatting with his fellow waiting-room occupants, autographing pamphlets—informational leaflets with title like “STD: You’re at Risk,” “AIDS: Not Just a Homosexual Disease,” “The Warning Signs of Cancer,” and “Who Needs a Mammogram?” Eventually a man in scrubs appears and says, “Dr. Ellis?” and he and Bethan move into the future with the identities that this scenario provides.
Gaelan is as surprised as anyone when he chooses the other version.
“No,” he says to the young man in overalls who cannot see how frightened his father is, how frightened his brother is, how frightened he himself is—for Gaelan somehow knows that they all have good reason to be frightened. “No,” he says again, making sure that there is kindness in his voice. “I’m not the weatherman.”
He turns then to Bethan. She is looking at him from behind smudged lenses, her eyes slightly widened. “I’d like that,” he answers. “I’d like to hear about your life.”
“Dr. Ellis?” the man in scrubs announces. “Mr. Jones?”
“So from what I can tell, there’s nothing systemic going on here,” the doctor says, referring to the CT images he’s brought with him into Viney’s ER room; she’s still fast asleep. “No sign of a major brain bleed or even a small infarction.” He flips through Viney’s chart. “Has she been under any stress lately?”
“Her husband died suddenly last August,” Bethan replies. Gaelan loves her for this: referring to his father as Viney’s husband.
“Well, that could certainly account for the depression, but the agitated speech … the personality changes … Given her age, I’d like to keep her overnight for observation. You’ll need to fill out some forms at the front desk, and then we’ll get her admitted upstairs.”
Bethan telephones Viney’s house while Gaelan deals with paperwork.
“That’s taken care of, at least,” she says, once she’s off the phone. “Bonnie can stay the night with Eli. Now, let’s get you up to Radiology.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve been watching you all night, Gaelan. I saw your face when you picked her up.”
She leads him down a long featureless hall to an elevator. They ride up two floors, emerge, wind along another nondescript passageway—this one under construction—and then arrive at a larger bank of elevators and go down three floors. Gaelan hates hospitals. They seem expressly designed to make people feel confused, paranoid, and helpless. At least he has a knowledgeable guide; Bethan’s pace is so brisk and purposeful that he almost has to jog to keep up with her.
“What is it they’re going to do?” he asks.
“It’s called an arthrogram: a type of X-ray. It involves injecting a special dye into your shoulder joint first so we can get a good look at what’s going on in there.”
His stomach lurches.
“Don’t worry,” she says, softening her tone. “I know how you feel about needles, so I’ll do the injections myself.”
When it’s over, Bethan studies the X-rays, her face grim. “This is pretty much what I thought,” she says. “You’ve got a minor tear in your rotator cuff.”
“What does that mean?” he asks, feigning ignorance.
She peers at him over the tops of her glasses. “It means that you’re going
to have to stop doing whatever it is that you’ve been doing, use a combination of ice and heat compression therapy, take the pain meds I’m going to prescribe for you, and stop lifting weights. Before we leave, I’ll copy some literature for you to take home.”
“I can’t do that. Give up lifting.”
“Then I guess I’ll be scheduling you for a surgical repair?” He’s never seen her in physician mode. She’s very cute. “Don’t be stupid, Gaelan,” she goes on. “I’ll show you some exercises you can do and get you set up with a physical therapist.”
“Okay, Doc.”
She is unamused. “Let’s go check on Viney. She should be settled in by now.”
It’s three in the morning when they get to Viney’s room; a nurse is checking her vital signs. Bethan introduces herself and then starts looking through Viney’s medical records. Gaelan pulls up a chair.
Viney’s eyes flutter open. “Welly?” she murmurs.
“Good morning, Mrs. Closs,” the nurse says. “My name is Herman and I’ll be taking care of you today.”
“Where’s Welly?” Viney asks fearfully.
Gaelan takes her hand. “Hi, Viney.”
“Gaelan, honey! Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital.” She looks so confused, so tiny, so aged. “Bethan and I brought you up to Lincoln because you weren’t feeling well.”
“Bethan’s here, too?”
“Hello, Viney.” Bethan comes around to the other side of the bed and smoothes Viney’s hair away from her face.
The nurse finishes listening to Viney’s heart. “I’ll be back later,” he says.
Viney watches him go and then starts to cry. She reaches for Gaelan’s hand.
“I miss him so much.”
“Of course you do,” Gaelan answers. “You and Dad were married a long time.”
Her eyes brighten, focus, and she grips his hand tighter. “Was it a marriage, honey?” she asks eagerly, plaintively. “Did you really think of it like that?”
“Of course we did, Viney,” Gaelan answers, surprised and sad that she would need to ask this question. “How could it have been anything else?”
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