by Kim Fu
Mundane. Cartoonish. Without the whiff of life-ending tragedy she was trying to convey. Sometimes a faint curl at the edges of her listener’s mouth, as though they were picturing Nita sprawled on the floor, animated birds and stars circling her head.
The doctor who examined Nita thought she had a mild concussion, told her to take the afternoon off and monitor herself. He was skeptical when she later told him about the migraines. A dry hangover, a cleaving pain behind her eyes and a sensitivity to sound and light. Something she could work through if she had to, like a strobe light in a noisy room. He was even more skeptical when Nita said she thought her personality had changed as a result of a traumatic brain injury. He ordered all the tests she requested and they came back clean. “Some doctors can’t resist giving themselves fanciful diagnoses,” he said, speaking in general terms to soften the insult, which Nita recognized as a physician’s trick. “Maybe the migraines are just a coincidence.”
She read her chart. The standard phrasing, “Patient claims headaches began with blunt trauma from falling box,” caused a bubble of anger to pop in her gut. She didn’t claim anything. What happened was what happened.
Sadiq wouldn’t back her up. She seemed the same to him, he said. If anything, they got along better these days. He liked having her home so much. He even threw this out: “I’m a doctor too.”
“A cardiologist!” she shouted. “Not neuro.”
“Well, what did the neurologist say?”
Nita stormed off. She slept off her migraine in the bathtub. When she woke in the evening, she called her father and had the same argument, except she shouted, “You’re an anesthesiologist!” She told her father about being unable to carry a teacup on a saucer; it rattled too much. “Shaky hands,” she said. “Tell me that’s not a neurological symptom.”
“Weren’t you always like that? I thought that’s why you didn’t consider surgical. Your mother’s hands are shaky, and nothing fell on her head,” her father said. She could hear the TV on in the background.
“I was never interested in surgical. My speech is different too,” Nita continued. “Slower. Can’t you hear it?”
“You mean slurred? No, you sound fine.”
“No. Slower. People used to complain about how I talked too fast, remember?”
“Then isn’t that a good thing?”
Sharply, Nita asked, “Good thing for whom?”
Her father paused. “What did the neurologist say?”
Nita kept a log of all the changes that no one else noticed:
Television. Before the accident, she had grown to hate it. She would sit beside Sadiq on the couch, her leg twitching, her mind reeling with everything else she could be doing. The figures on the screen seemed to say such inane, obvious things. So did real people, of course, but TV shows seemed worse for the contrivance—someone wrote this dialogue, other people approved it, other people memorized it, millions of dollars were spent. Now, alone in her bedroom in the day, Nita watched daytime soaps on the small second TV. She found them comforting, the light and color palette of the cheap sets, the rhythm of the overenunciated voices, the stories that demanded little from her.
Her changed gait. She walked softer, slower, rolling her feet, no longer her mother’s little elephant.
Her favorite Vietnamese deli. She’d only ever had the banh mi sandwich. It was so good she’d never felt the need to order anything else. She’d brought her colleagues there and insisted they order the banh mi as well, and held a small, secret scorn for the ones who ordered pho or another sandwich, who chose to miss out.
The first time she went back there after the accident, when she got to the front of the line, the sight of the menu boards stopped her. Four white placards, printed in small text with square photographs of each dish. The items were numbered one to seventy-two. Seventy-two. Nita felt dazed, paralyzed, unable to parse this huge array, even to separate the English and the Vietnamese, like she’d forgotten how to read. Which of these seventy-two items did she want?
Sadiq’s mother came to visit after Nita’s injury. Nita had always found her mother-in-law irritating, her visits endless, but this time, it was a relief to have someone else around. The cooking Nita had hated—cheap, fatty cuts of meats swimming in oil, lentils overcooked to paste, corrosive with salt and chili peppers—now tasted homey and comforting.
Nita woke from a nap—that was another thing for the log, naps—and followed the sound of voices to the living room. Sadiq and his mother were beside each other on the sofa, their backs to Nita. They kept talking. They hadn’t heard her come down the hallway. She realized they were talking about her. She leaned weightlessly against the wall to listen.
“She thinks they missed something on the MRI. I think she’s just relaxed for the first time in her life, from not working. You know she used to record everything we ate? Not just what she ate—what I ate as well. To make sure we were getting enough macronutrients. Even on vacation. She finally gave it a rest.”
“She told me she liked my lamb!” Sadiq’s mother said.
“She let me pick the movie last night.”
Nita let him pick the movie all the time! Didn’t she? Except when he picked something stupid, or he took too long, scrolling through screen after screen of listings, seemingly paralyzed. Like she’d been at the deli.
“And”—Sadiq got excited, turning more toward his mother, pulling his legs up on the couch like a child—“she even . . . I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but . . .”
“I’m your mother! What can’t you tell me?”
Sadiq paused, rolling something around in his mind. Nita remembered, dimly, that those silences used to infuriate her, especially during an argument; she’d wanted to shake him and say, What? What is it? Spit it out! “You know Nita’s never wanted kids.”
His mother gasped.
Sadiq stared into the middle distance. “I wasn’t sure. Or—no. I wanted kids, definitely. But Nita had this . . . rock-solid argument against them. Why nobody should have kids. Overpopulation and finances and all kinds of stuff. She does this thing where she talks really fast, and she doesn’t take a breath, and everything she says has this airtight logic that just . . . that doesn’t let you in. Makes you feel stupid.”
“And now?”
“She said she’s thinking about it.”
Sadiq’s mother let out a shout of joy and hugged Sadiq around the neck.
Worst of all, her brain, its exquisite machinery. Had she been that dead-set against children? Or had she just wanted to win the argument against Sadiq, who hadn’t been able to articulate why he wanted them, who wanted to upend their life and flood it with unknowns without a plan, a specific reason for doing so? Did she not want a baby, viscerally, or was it just the more defensible position? She’d once felt so certain about everything, that she knew what was best for her and for Sadiq and for her smoking, overeating, motorcycle-riding, aggravatingly noncompliant patients.
She still had her near-photographic memory, but it was harder to make decisions, big and small, banh mi and baby. It was harder to sort through all that information, networks expanding in infinite fractals out from the center of her mind. When she started seeing patients again, she did what she was supposed to do: she gave them the most likely explanation for their symptoms and sent them on their way. But she wanted to tell each patient every possible scenario, the most improbable causes, the way each disease might progress. She could see it all at once, all the branches of their lives splitting and splitting again, terminating in a thousand different deaths, in three days, in fifty years. She struggled to shift between patients. She had twenty minutes, sometimes fifteen, to examine, diagnose, and write her notes.
When it became too much, the thin, bright blade of a migraine sliced through the chaos. She admitted to herself, without telling Sadiq, that she might need to change careers. Perhaps she could research or teach.
One morning, she noticed she’d left a suitcase in the car, after a trip to a co
nference two months earlier. It had sat nestled on the floor of the backseat, full of dirty laundry, while she’d wondered vaguely what had happened to this or that shirt or sweater. She sighed and dragged it into the house.
She opened the suitcase and the first thing she saw was a mostly empty birth-control-pill pack. No. She’d been on birth control for seven years and had never missed a single pill. Had she seriously forgotten for two straight months? Impossible. She bit the inside of her mouth nervously. Her teeth felt fuzzy on her tongue; she hadn’t brushed them that morning. She might not have brushed them the night before either.
3
Nita headed to the far corner of her backyard that housed the stacked wooden frames of her beehive. She put on her beekeeping suit in the shed and lit the smoker. The view from behind a widow’s veil. The bees landed on Nita’s hat and nylon-covered arms, too light to feel, their antennae twitching cautiously. She cooed a greeting as she approached the colony, unconsciously trying to harmonize with the held tone of their buzzing, to soothe as she stole.
In the shed, Nita crushed the comb she’d taken into a jar. She duct-taped that jar upside down on top of another jar with a layer of mesh between them, on a sunny corner of the work table. The honey flowed with meditative slowness. She wanted to sit on the floor and watch it ooze, trapping the amber light through the dusty square window in the shed door, stare into its center until her thoughts passed away. She wanted to sit naked in the bathtub and pour fresh, warm honey over herself until she was a sticky golden statue.
Six months earlier, Nita had gone to her first meeting of the local beekeepers’ society, at the home of Jeanne and Simon, the British couple who headed the society and wrote the obsessive but charmingly self-aware newsletter. They showed off the hives they kept on their three-acre vineyard, located in the hills between sprawling mansion estates and unconquered fields of bramble, roosters crowing in the distance. Nita had loved the smell of their smoker, filled with pine needles, and felt curiously unafraid as the confused bees poured out.
In Jeanne and Simon’s living room, drinking their wine, Nita described the dimensions of her backyard, and her plans to start a hive behind the shed. A gruff, widowed retiree in the corner, who also kept a large number of colonies on a large tract of land, said, “That’s too small. You’ll be giving up most of your yard to the bees. Your kids will have nowhere to play.”
“Nonsense!” Simon had crowed. “That’s plenty of room. And your kids can get into beekeeping when they’re just a little bit older. Lots of families do it together.” He and Jeanne were childless. “We’ll help you get set up and pick your gear.”
Bees as a species were passing from the earth unexplained, but hers were orderly, unmysterious, a society that functioned under rules and roles, with Nita as god above all.
Nita removed her suit, left the shed, and returned to the house. She passed by Sadiq on the computer in the living room, several windows open across the immense monitor: basketball scores, a medical paper, the Wall Street Journal, Twitter, a tech blog review of a new phone. Nita wondered if he just added porn to the matrix, or if it got to be full-screen. Did he keep one eye on the real-time stock values as he jacked off?
“I have a late tee-off today,” Sadiq said, without looking up. “Will you be okay with the boys?”
Seeing the quotidian masculinity of his interests, laid out across the computer screen like tiles in a mosaic, she felt a kind of despair. This was a man who never liked anything he hadn’t been told to like. A man built by and for advertising. “Sure,” she said. Of course she’d be fine. Her children ate fresh honey, fresh berries from the runners she’d planted for the bees, elaborate meals from scratch. She made her own cleaning agents and bath products. The hours flew. The hours crawled.
Evan, her older son, burst out of his bedroom door as she passed in the hallway. He’d been waiting for her, coiled like the springs of a trap. “Ahhh-ahhh-ahhh! I am George of the Jungle!”
“Pajama time is over, George,” Nita said.
“No!” Evan shouted. “Pajamas all day!”
“Pajamas are for sleeping,” Nita said.
“Pajamas are for all day.”
“It’s time to put on your tee-ball uniform. You wear your uniform to tee ball.”
“No, I wear pajamas to tee ball.”
“Did you wear pajamas to tee ball last week?”
“Yes, I did!”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I did! I did, I did, I did!”
Nita often found herself in this position. Evan, four years old and immune to reason, was perhaps the first equal she’d ever had in an argument.
Evan slammed the door to his bedroom and held it shut. Nita pushed down the handle and forced the door open with her shoulder. Evan ran to the corner and faced Nita, his knees bent, ready to sprint past her. She grabbed him by the waist and wrestled him out of his pajamas before he slipped from her grasp, running back into the hallway in his underwear.
“Ahhh-ahhh-ahhh!”
Sadiq had meandered in their direction. “Hey, buddy,” he said to Evan, “it’s almost time to go. Do you want me to drive you?”
“No! I don’t want to go to tee ball. I hate it.”
Nita, gathering up his gear, muttered, “Last week, you said it was your favorite thing.” Evan had to be run every day, burned out as much as possible. Tee-ball, the pool, the playground, the trampoline gym, just a big, fenced-in field—otherwise there’d be hell to pay. He had Wolf’s gift for targeted destruction. So often she’d come upon Evan holding something only Nita loved over his head, the glee in his face as he let it drop.
“Did not! I hate it! You’re lying!”
“I can pick you up afterward and we can go for ice cream,” Sadiq coaxed.
“I hate it! I want to stay home and play! I want Mom to take me!”
Nita threw his duffel bag of tee-ball crap into the hallway. She knelt before Evan and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Which one?” she said. “You want to stay home, or you want me to take you? Make sense!”
Evan looked stunned for a moment. He started to cry.
“Nita, he’s just a kid,” Sadiq said.
She shook Evan lightly. “Evan! Look at me. Do you want to stay home or do you want me to take you to tee ball?”
Evan gasped each word through his tears. “I . . . want . . . you . . . to . . . take . . . me.”
“All right then.” She picked up Evan and he threw his arms around her neck with abandon, burying his snot-covered face in her hair. There was a slight pinch in her back that she had no time to investigate. She put him down on the dresser that had been his changing table, his long legs hanging off the end, and dressed him like a baby.
Sadiq hovered behind her. “He’s only like this when you’re around. He’s so different when it’s just him and me.”
“So you’ve said.”
Once dressed, the boy held out his arms to be lifted again.
“Should I carry him to your car?” Sadiq asked.
“Mommy,” Evan demanded flatly.
“Let’s give Mommy a break, buddy,” Sadiq said.
“Mommy!”
Sadiq jumped back. “Should I check on Mati?” he said to Nita.
Couldn’t he just do something, anything, without asking first? “Mati’s fine,” Nita said. “He’s asleep. I’ll wake him up to come with us.” She picked up Evan by the armpits and put him down, upright, on the floor. “I have to carry your brother. You have to walk. Go put your shoes on.”
“Carry me!”
“Put your shoes on right now.”
Evan ran away. To put on his shoes, or more likely not. Sadiq said, “Don’t you think you’re too hard on him?”
Nita recalled when, recently, Evan had knocked a small picture frame off the mantel, cracking the glass. He was home with Sadiq and the so-called mother’s helper they’d hired, a high school senior from the neighborhood named Holly. Both Holly and Sadiq had somehow not seen this happe
n. Evan hid the frame in his toy bin before announcing, casually, “I have something to show Mommy.”
“What is it?” Sadiq had asked.
“It’s for Mommy only.”
She’d yelled, he’d cried. As he must have known only she would yell, that Holly and Sadiq might let him get away with it, comfort him, say it was an accident. The same thing happened when he’d run face-first into the door frame. He wouldn’t let Sadiq come anywhere near him, wouldn’t allow anyone else to tend to the small cut on the side of his head. “Don’t touch me,” he’d screamed. “Mommy! Mommy!” Getting shriller and shriller.
Another day, Nita had gone to a job interview for a part-time position in pharmaceutical research. Evan had asked Holly when Nita would be back and she told him three o’clock. Evan nodded, accepting this, and they’d had a fun, normal afternoon.
Evan could recognize numbers at an early age, before anyone had made a conscious effort to teach him. Holly told Nita, later, that when the digital clock rolled over to 3:00, it was like a switch flipped inside him. “Where’s Mommy?” he asked.
“She’ll be back soon.”
“You said three. When the first number is three.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Maybe she’s stuck in traffic.”
“Where’s Mommy?”
“I told you—she’ll be back soon.”
“I want Mommy.”
“Evan—”
“I. Want. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Where’s Mommy?”
Mommy Mommy Mommy. Exhausting. Maddening. But also—to Nita’s truest, darkest self—intoxicating.
She wrangled both boys into the car, tightly gripping one of Evan’s wrists until she’d clicked him into place. When the garage door was open, he had a tendency to run down the driveway, barreling into the road, unafraid and unrepentant, no matter how many times she’d scooped him up or pleaded for him to never, ever do that again. Evan banged on the glass with both fists.
Nita settled into the driver’s seat. Evan tried to lean forward, reaching for her, while his restraints kept him in place. “Ahhh-ahhh-ahhh!” he yodeled, directly into her ear.