by Jill Malone
My mother told me that birds were really dislodged spirits looking for another body. I used to run shrieking from them among the orchard trees. The way they hovered in the trade winds, it seemed as if they were scouring the ground for me in particular. Whenever a flock flew overhead, my mother shouted: Spirit hunting. It lent an entirely new meaning to a murder of crows.
My last night in hospital, my insomnia will return and the athletic Indian nurse—the one who removed my breathing tube, the one I thought I’d invented during my post-coma delusions—will appear on rounds, wearing her mauve scrubs, her clogs, her confidence. Bustling around my bed soundlessly in her clogs, she will give me a light sedative: “Just to reduce the anxiety of being awake.” With her hand on my forehead, I am a small child, closing my eyes on the image of her silver earrings, aching for mobility, for my insomniac walks through the city: the streets glowing as though painted in oil; my senses heightened by the movement of trees, a shift of color in my peripheral vision, the curious bulk of shadows. Somewhere beyond me, a voice, or maybe a couple passes on their way between places. And what sticks with me each time is how separate I am from the couple, the oil painting, the indistinct mound of a house in the dark and the way whichever animal might pass me continues its creeping as if I do not exist.
When Grey arrived at hospital—skin bronzed and hair scruffy—he grinned at me in the old way, slipped a jumbo bag of iso peanuts onto my bedside table, threaded his fingers through mine, and said: “Fuck you, Janie, goddam drama queen.”
I let him and Emily arrange my release, meet with my recovery team, formulate a timeline of rehabilitation. None of it matters to me: Audrey hasn’t arrived.
The night before the accident, I stood in the courtyard below Audrey’s flat for hours, trying to decide if I should walk the two flights of steps back to her red-wooden door and barter, or if I should catch my breath and go as she had calmly suggested while rinsing her hands at the kitchen sink. Catch my breath and go. In the courtyard, I shivered as a light rain came down against the thin red petals of a hibiscus. Above me, in the chalked outline of the building, someone pushed a window open and I waited as though something important might happen, the way a child anticipates her father calling her home to dinner in that gray time before night. Anticipates so clearly the sound of the screen door and has already turned for home when he calls her name. During my hospital stay, I return to that moment of the window being raised, the faint sound of the wood sticking, and then the clumsy rise of the sash sliding into its niche. I return to that moment because something important did happen: no one called me home.
Later that same night, I got lost in the University District following the course of student lamps in the most remote section of Manoa to a dead-end corner where well back among the kukui nut trees stood a pale wooden house with a black light above the screen door. A keg was buried in the grassless front yard. From the street, I waited for someone to come outside, for some clue as to the revelers housed in such a desolate corner. It had been raining for hours, the street glazed with the trees, the blue of the house, and suddenly a thin line of red. She had watched me from the doorway, her dress straining against her. Cigarette smoke loped above her into the doorframe.
“Are you a stalker?”
She stepped forward with her right hand above her brow as if to protect herself from sun glare. I walked toward her deliberately, pushing my hair back to alleviate suspicion. I’m one of those harmless people walking the drenched, abandoned world at three in the morning. She offered a cigarette and leaned against me to light it. She was slender and small, with a cockeyed smile that crept across her face and stayed.
“How far have you walked?”
My shirt was soaked through to my nipples and my khaki shorts clung tightly to my thighs. I had an impulse to reach out and cup one of her tiny ears in my palm. To cradle her.
“Don’t say anything, you’ll spoil the mystery.”
“Whose party is this?” I asked.
“Mine a few hours ago. Now it’s for sale, cheap.”
“Past your bedtime?”
“I could go for hours if it were worth staying awake.”
I sat on the stoop beside her and sucked at the Camel Light. It was easy to walk away from Audrey. Wasn’t there always another girl? Audrey had followed Emily and then there would be another and more after her. There would be boys as well. There always had been, and sooner or later another Nick with his bag of tools and rhetoric to convince me of anything. Behind us in the house, an early Cure album played. Cigarette smoke escaped into the night, merged with the rain; her leg brushed against mine, insisting anyone can redeem me.
The Montana dykes are to blame for everything. I know I said that and I understand now that it isn’t true. But I suffered from the comparison: their forthright, deliberate living as opposed to my arbitrary, dead reckoning meander. “Don’t you see,” Audrey had said, “it takes courage to settle; it takes courage and resilience to make a life with someone. I can’t do it for both of us. I can’t be another thing that happens to you; you have to choose how you live, how you love.”
But what if I choose badly? What if in ten years, or worse yet five years, she turns to me one morning over a tofu scramble and says: “This isn’t the life I want. This isn’t the life I want.” Suppose our relationship becomes, essentially, like Latin: an admirable, purposeful language diluted to derivatives. Then the utility of the language no longer matters—a tool of scientists and scholars; a root for linguists; an incantation during traditional Catholic services—since ultimately the fact of Latin’s extinction belies its legitimacy and merit.
“Jane?” Dr. Mya says, watching closely as my mind wanders back to her office, her interrogation, her serious hairstyle. “How did you get to work the morning of the accident?”
My first impulse is to say that I biked. I used to catch a ride with Chance Chang until he quit to go on some crazy-assed backpacking odyssey through India. After Chance left, I biked to work, but I was late the morning of the accident; again I saw the peanut butter alone on the cupboard shelf. It was after six, and I didn’t know where I was; I had been lost when I first wandered upon this house, I had been walking.
“I took a taxi because I was late.”
Where had I picked up the taxi? I remembered grabbing the peanut butter on my way out the door and sprinting from the cul-de-sac, my clothes still wet from the previous night’s rain. I hadn’t had time to shower. Had it been raining that morning? Yes, the street had shallow pools of water along its surface, and I’d been leaping to avoid the worst puddles but was drenched anyway by the time I’d arrived at the 7-11.
“Why were you late?”
“I’d had trouble sleeping the night before. I’d been walking through Manoa until three or four in the morning.”
“So you took a taxi to work. Then what do you remember?”
“I don’t remember arriving at work. But I remember the taxi. The driver had a nasty scar on his cheek, under his eye.”
The evening before the accident, I’d cooked pasta with zucchini, mushrooms, and roasted red peppers. Audrey came up from the studio late and said she wasn’t hungry. I’d just poured gin into a tumbler when she said she wanted me to leave—the liquid swirled over the edge of the glass and soaked into the placemat.
“What are you talking about?”
“I want you to go.”
I stood up, dazed, as if I’d been kicked in the chest. Had something happened? Why didn’t I know that something had happened? I walked toward the sink, still not believing. I’d just made pasta. I’d just poured gin. All the pots washed, dried, and put away in the cupboard.
“What’s happened?”
She rinsed her hands at the sink, turned the faucet off, and looked at me, her face paler even than usual. Her eyes more black than blue.
“This morning after you left, I lay in bed for hours. I couldn’t make myself get up. All morning, all I could think was that I’ll never be able to convi
nce you. I’ll never convince you not to panic. I’ll never convince you that I love you. I’ll never convince you that it’s easier to leave than to stay. I’ll never convince you to settle.”
She kept one hand on the faucet, as if she needed to hold onto something. Her body, flexed and tense as a jaguar, warned me not to take another step forward. I wished I had my gin as a buffer, but to return to the table might be seen as a concession.
“Jane, you haven’t even left a toothbrush here. You bring everything back and forth in your pack. I don’t want to be the next chick you leave a Best Regards letter.”
I stepped backwards, the sense that I’d been kicked again in the chest so convincing that I actually leaned on the counter as I retreated. What kind of fucking ragtime trip was this? I sank into the chair at the table and stared at the tumbler of gin. She sounded like she despised me, like she had despised me for a long time. I thought my struggle to stay had been a private one—a conflict between my character and my desire—but Audrey forced me to consider that we had been in silent contention all along: each needing assurance from the other that this train went to a different and better city. I downed the gin to keep from vomiting. Not a single assurance occurred to me as my esophagus caught fire. Then she called me a coward.
Dr. Mya touches my hand and my mind trudges back into her office again. I hate the squeaky hallways, the fluorescent lights, the murmuring relay of shifts and rounds, the discomfort of this wheelchair in this spice-scented office with this severe professional, the fact that my right arm still won’t respond properly to my neurosurgeon’s tests. Audrey won’t come. Nick came, but Audrey won’t. The whole fucking scene is inconceivable.
I feel itchy. Dr. Mya seems to need assurances too. She needs to be convinced that I will recover, that somehow my dislodged spirit will find a body. As she stoops beside my chair, her mascara masterfully applied to her probing eyes, she reaches her hand up to my forehead in a reassuring gesture I have come to crave in this hospital, and I feel my headache diminish as clearly as someone walking backwards from a room.
With her hand on my forehead, she says, “You hear the screen door slam.”
I hear the screen door thwack behind me. A fog over the airport, rain on the tarmac, and my leg starts to burn.
“You hear the screen door slam.”
I do. I hear it.
“My leg—”
“Jane, look at me. Look at me. You hear the door.”
I look at her and I hear the door slam and I’m standing in the cul-de-sac. Rain punches everything in sight and I am drenched long before I find a familiar street. Petals smeared along the pavement, the smell of cigarettes washed clean.
“It was raining.”
“Yes.”
“I left the house and it was raining.”
I remember shivering in my clothes in the backseat, the yeasty taxi smell, my head sore with wakefulness. At the airport, the tarmac was slick. I’d climbed up the ramp to the underside of the airplane. I can see the cargo door now, the hatch lock in my hands.
“The lock was stuck—the latch wouldn’t turn.”
“The latch?”
“The latch on the cargo door was stuck. I couldn’t get it to turn.”
“The door wouldn’t open?”
But it did open. The door opened partway, but the netting was stuck.
“I got the door to open, but there was something wrong with the netting. It was tangled around a large package. I was trying to tug it loose—the netting, the package—whichever would give. It was raining and everything was slippery: the ramp, the tarmac, the cargo door. I remember something was wrong with the netting.”
“It was stuck on a package,” she said.
“And I couldn’t untangle it. I took off my gloves and started heaving on the straps, that latch, the netting, but they wouldn’t give, so I leaned back, and heaved with my whole body, dangling from the netting like some goddam bat. When the straps broke or released or untangled, and I fell. I remember falling. I fell and fell and then my leg—”
“Your leg?”
“My leg hurt so bad I thought it had been torn off. I remember being sick. That’s it, though. I remember white and being sick.”
“White?”
A shroud of white, I want to say, a halo.
“A glow of it. A glow of white when my leg felt like it was being torn off.”
I want to leave this place. I want to be well. A flash of red in the pavement, as red as Audrey’s jeep; a glow of white in my head like a halo; “Catch your breath and go,” she said. “Go,” she said. A window sliding upwards, a path through an orchard, a sprawling fall: Audrey.
Dr. Mya squeezes my good hand; she’s still kneeling beside me. That long plunge from the ramp, reminiscent of the leap off Waimea Rock with Grey on our lost day, had not ended in a kiss. When the netting seized up around me, a wincing—a searing—a radiant pain flashed through my body. I don’t remember hitting the tarmac, only a sort of muttering, obscure muttering like the tide in the dark.
Afterward
While I stayed at Emily’s, the live-in nurse (who came, sadly, from the school of Crumb rather than athletic Indian nurses) tortured me with constant exercise despite my casts and headaches, in addition to a battery of cognitive tests more thorough than anything I’d used conducting research experiments at the Linguistics Institute. By the time my casts were removed and I officially began physical therapy at St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Clinic, the therapist assured me of a complete recovery. So I left for the orchard with Grey and Emily.
Grey assigned himself as the Maui Field Officer and worked three days a week for Mako Surf Company. The rest of the week, he assisted my father with orchard projects. He and Emily bought a truck for Emily’s commute to the airport, and Grey’s various marketing meetings at surf shops around the island. On the evenings when Emily had gone back to Oahu to tend bar or supervise production of her latest documentary, The Extinction of Indigenous Species in Hawaii, Grey read to me as we rocked in the wooden swing we’d built among the new-growth trees. We read Didion essays, Perez-Reverte mysteries, short stories by Poe, Welty, Carver; whatever my father and Therese kept in their library, we read. Later, Grey and I would call this time our sabbatical, pretending our days were as carefree as some child’s summer holiday, though for us it was already fall. The only boycotted subject was love—except for Grey’s observation as we washed dishes one evening that from his perspective love meant never having to initiate.
I knew Emily had tried to call Audrey a number of times after my release from hospital. I’d overheard Grey and Emily bickering about it. Grey told Emily calling only made things worse.
“It’d be less complicated if you weren’t involved. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Jane asked me to call the little bitch. How is it possible she wouldn’t come to see her? What kind of fucked up shit is that? I mean if your ex were in a car wreck or something, you’d go, right?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Bullshit, Ryan. You know you’d go. You’re a responsible person, and that’s what responsible people do.”
“What if this had happened when you and Jane weren’t speaking? Would you have visited?”
“Yes. But I wouldn’t have said anything.”
While living in Emily’s house, obviously, I had access to a phone and might have rung Audrey myself, but I didn’t have the nerve. I thought of writing her a letter, but I didn’t want to dictate it to anyone, so I waited until Maui when I could navigate the rutted paths alone, and then I scrawled:Come to the orchard.
Best regards,
Jane
I didn’t post the letter until January, hoping futilely that I’d think of something better to send instead. Ultimately, I enclosed a plane ticket, and posted the letter from town during one of my trips to the physical therapist.
Three mornings a week, Therese drove me to my appointments; the cab of her truck had become my confessional. As she drove—foot jammed
into the clutch, right arm dragging the shifter as the truck groaned, eyes focused forward—I told her all that I could bear to tell, giving an accurate sketch of events, and feeling, in spite of my embarrassment, the necessity of opening all the cages.
My physical therapist, a retired professional dancer who currently competed on the triathlon circuit, promised me I’d be mountain biking by June. She said physical therapy, like running marathons, required a great deal of pain.
“There’s a moment every race when you’ve hit the wall. Your body has given everything: you taste blood; your muscles knot and cramp; your legs wobble; you gasp like a horse. You’re going to break and you know what you do? You know what you do? You run through it. You run through it and then a feeling of euphoria rolls over you and you’re running faster than you ran before.”
Therese always stayed in the truck and read the paper while I chased euphoria, and one afternoon when I came out, she reached across to me and turned my head towards her. Her sharp little eyes examined me and she held onto my head, her grip so assured she could have snapped my neck.
“You want to be well, Jane, you know what you do? You forgive yourself. It’s that simple. OK? Forgive yourself.”
Then she let go, turned the engine over, and we drove home listening to a Tracy Chapman CD.
The old shepherd, Toby, had died the previous summer, and my father and I went to a neighbor’s to pick a chocolate lab pup from a litter of eight-week-olds. We named the pup, Hazel, and let her tear around the orchard paths like the hellion she was. For my right arm, I carried a tennis ball, squeezing it to strengthen my muscles, and Hazel’s favorite game involved stealing my tennis ball and playing keep away around the lowest branches of the new-growth trees. We were out there one chilled afternoon in February, Hazel gnawing on my tennis ball beneath a mango tree while I lounged on the swing reading Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.
I didn’t hear the truck, though we expected Emily that evening, but Hazel dropped the ball in the grass and cocked her ears. In a moment, she bounded down the trail and began snuffling and leaping her dance of joy. From the swing I saw copper-colored hair. By the time I got to them, Audrey, squealing delightedly, had dropped to the ground as Hazel butted heads, licked indiscriminately, and wriggled her body like a fat brown fish. (Hazel’s theory of existence required thoroughness in all things.) And I watched them until Audrey finally looked up, her eyes narrowed to protect herself against the small ramming body, her long throat exposed in the afternoon light, and I knew I would go blind with her, that we were beyond all walking, that we were winged.