by Monica Wood
. . .
Why, thank you. It didn’t occur to me at the time that Laurentas might have inherited his hands from me, because what he said next nearly set my hair on fire.
. . .
“If I’d known about you, Mother, I’d have visited sooner.”
. . .
Exactly. She didn’t tell him word one. All those letters she wrote, Dearest Girl this and Darling Girl that. When he turned two she asked for a photograph to keep next to his bed. Do you have any idea what it cost me to procure a photograph in 1916? Here I thought my countenance would remind her of that little girl she had taught and loved, and that she would make sure Laurentas thought well of me, and the whole time she was erasing me in the most calculating fashion imaginable.
. . .
Yes! The very same Maud-Lucy Stokes who landed in Kimball by accident and stayed because of me. Forty years later here was our son, standing in my apartment on the day of the president’s regrettable death, a teary-eyed surgeon in a handsome suit, missing his mother.
. . .
Oh, I painted a pretty picture: Her cats on the piano. Her books in the parlor. Her houseplants and tablecloths. I told him how girls and boys lined up at her door for lessons, even the children of the town founder, who’d financed and stocked the Kimball schoolhouse himself.
. . .
Because it was the same as telling him about me. I was Maud-Lucy’s girl. I gave Laurentas all the letters she’d written, all those beautifully inked missives on pastel paper, all her poetic thoughts on music, on the greening or waning of the apple orchards, all her motherly advice on how to wear a hat veil or keep gloves from yellowing. They weren’t really mine anymore. “You’ll find delightful accounts of your babyhood,” I told him.
. . .
She stopped writing when he reached the age of eight.
. . .
Maybe she feared I’d take a notion to visit. He was at the age when a little explaining would be required. But I had children of my own by then and was in no position to travel.
. . .
Laurentas? He said he was sorry. I suppose he was.
. . .
I said, “I had two more sons. Maud-Lucy was your mother always.” But I didn’t feel as sanguine as I sounded. Inside I was swimming with rage. All this while I could hear Walter Cronkite, who was sounding more gut-punched by the second.
. . .
A newsman, back when newsmen had to know things. Laurentas took the letters. I had them wrapped in muslin.
. . .
He said, “Thank you for these. She was a wonderful mother.”
. . .
I agreed, of course. Who would know better than I? “I’m sorry for your loss, Laurentas,” I said to him, and then he got up to go. He headed down the stairs, and I stood on the porch, hugging myself against the cold, waiting for him to reappear on the street below. You could hear people’s televisions all up and down the street, everybody gripped by the national tragedy, and there I was on the porch in my flimsy sweater with my own trivial tragedy unfolding on top of a real one, my silly story about a girl betrayed by a woman, but it fell on me all of a sudden, with such—force—so much harder than it might have, I suppose, on a day when poor Jackie wasn’t wearing blood on her suit.
. . .
Nothing, really. What else was there to do? He came at Maud-Lucy’s behest. He had a big, complicated family already and that was enough.
. . .
I watched his handsome Chrysler edge down the street. I wondered where he planned to stay the night. Perhaps I should have asked him to stay with me.
. . .
Then—? I suppose I went back inside. I turned out the hall light, returned to my parlor, sat down on my couch, and cried my eyes out for the president.
Chapter 14
By the time Quinn thought to ask Ona for her son’s address, it was four in the afternoon and Belle was passing the WELCOME TO GRANYARD sign. The sky bore down on a puzzling stretch of village-style condo developments, a far cry from the apple-green raptures he’d been led to expect.
“Hey,” Quinn said, catching sight of a granite pillar. “I played here once.” He’d forgotten the name but now there it was: Hobson Christian College, a quintet of soulless buildings on twenty acres of desecrated farmland. A technical glitch during sound check had sent the boys into a tizzy of disbelief until Quinn told them, Guys, it’s a fuse, no prayer required.
“Where to, Ona?” Belle asked, slowing down. They were on a first-name basis now, united in female solidarity after a twenty-minute conversation about cats. How women cemented alliances over less than nothing impressed him anew.
“How’s that?” Ona said, cupping her ear. They’d rolled down all the windows, which in Quinn’s opinion just spread the heat around. But at this point no one was listening to him.
“The address,” Quinn said. “You—have it, right?” He and Belle had always traveled this way, back when they traveled: mapless, hurtling through space on instinct and whimsy. With Ona aboard, looking dangerously friable, this modus operandi lost a measure of its once-youthful verve.
“Of course I have it,” Ona said. “Do you take me for a goose?” She delved into the murky pit of her big black purse. The things she excavated—Life Savers, crumpled tissues, grocery receipts—had fuzzed over with age. “I know it’s in here,” she fretted. “It’s something to do with horses.” Again she plumbed the tenebrous depths, quivering with effort, her newly coiffed hair now jutting from her head like feathers on a badly plucked chicken.
She looked up. Except for the bright, stabbing eyes and a slash of lipstick, she all but dissolved against the sun-white background of the windshield. “I put it in this handbag,” she said. She glared at Quinn. “Did you take it?”
“Why would I take it?”
Ona puffed out her withered lips. “Maybe you took it to check the address?”
“I didn’t.”
“Quinn, you have the memory of a mayfly.”
“I think I’d remember ransacking a lady’s purse.”
“There’s always the phone book,” Belle said. “Don’t worry, Ona, we’ll find him.” She’d gone clammy in the melting heat, Quinn noted; he felt like a tour guide who’d led his party into a quaint town square only to discover a public hanging.
“I must have put it in my overnight case,” Ona said, more fretful now.
“Let’s check,” Belle said. “We’ll check.” She pulled into a Citgo station and opened the door to a blast of thick, chewable air.
“Wait, wait,” Ona said, producing a wrinkled envelope from the guts of her purse. “Here it is.” She was aging by the minute. What in hell had he been thinking, taking a woman her age on a trip of this length in a car with no air conditioning? She’d gone since lunch—two and a half hours—without moving. Was that dangerous?
Quinn examined the envelope. “How old is this?”
“What difference does that make?”
“You called ahead, right?”
“It would have been awkward to call ahead. I did not call ahead.”
“Fourteen-twenty Bridle Path Lane,” Belle read. She looked calm, motherly. “I bet we’re not far. I have a feeling.”
Quinn felt like both the mark and the con. Ona had swindled him into this trip, but not before he’d misled her into believing he’d be thrilled to do her a favor. Which—when push came to shove—he was. Which was something. He hung onto that, hoping it would get him past the next twenty minutes, at which point they might discover that Ona’s son’s house had collapsed in a storm, or changed owners, or been converted into a Pottery Barn.
“Ask that girl for directions,” Ona instructed him.
Despite his misgivings, he went through the motions, crossing the blistering macadam to consult with the gas attendant, a teenage redhead with cheeks the color of apricots. She reminded him of the young Belle, same ravenous expression. Belle had lost that expression over the years, becoming not so much sated-lookin
g as merely no longer hungry; but since the boy’s death that hungry look was back, in a way that did not, could not, arouse him as it once had. Ravenous was the wrong word now: starved, more likely. He bought three candy bars, then sprinted back to the car as if running from a mistake.
“It’s up ahead,” he announced. “Three or four miles.” He handed out the melting candy.
“I had in mind a place where the river cuts the land into green slopes,” Ona said, as Belle pulled back into traffic. “Maud-Lucy wrote the loveliest descriptions. They lived in the outskirts. Maybe it’s prettier there.”
Bridle Path Lane was a right-hand turn, a long, paved hill flanked by cakelike houses and ending at a compound of low brick buildings, four wings connected to a sparkling atrium, glossy as a butterfly’s belly. Out front hung an artsy wooden sign: ORCHARD ACRES CONDOMINIUMS. Swinging below that, on a ladder of panels of the sort used to advertise ice cream flavors, hung the caveats: INDEPENDENT LIVING; SEMI-INDEPENDENT LIVING; ASSISTED LIVING; EXTENDED CARE; MEMORY CARE. Below that, in irrefutable calligraphy: 1420 BRIDLE PATH LANE.
“This is a nursing home,” Belle said. She snatched the envelope from the dashboard.
Ona frowned. “He said condo.”
“This can’t be right.” Belle gaped at the tiered sign. “How old is your son?”
Ona got out stiffly, appearing to shrink in the white-bright air, her clothes fading with light as she picked her way around a rotund planter exploding with petunias.
“Ona, wait a sec,” Quinn called, but she paid him no mind. The entrance was mercifully close, an automatic door that opened silently and swallowed her in.
Belle was breathing hard, sweating and open-mouthed. “Oh, God.” She glanced around in desperation. “Oh, God. What if he’s in a coma?” Her poise puddled away on the instant and her voice dropped to a whisper. “He must be—what? Seventy-five?”
“Ninety.”
“Oh, my God. I was thinking, you know, a son. He’s ninety?” She shook her head as if trying to dislodge information.
“Belle, she was fourteen. I told you the story.”
“I realize that,” Belle snapped. “Don’t you think I realize that? I didn’t do the goddamn math.” Her shirt, he noted for the first time, was stained. “You said she had a son she hadn’t seen for a while. Of course I know—I know she couldn’t possibly—I forgot. I didn’t do the math.”
Anticipating consequences had never been Quinn’s strong suit, but as he shepherded Belle inside he considered possible outcomes—including but not limited to Ona’s sudden death and Belle’s emergency admittance to the nearest psych ward. He ranked these things, from most likely to least, in the panicky fashion that used to drive needles into his eyeballs when the boy did it.
The reception area resembled the lobby of Great Universal Mail Systems: patterned carpet, fake-crystal chandelier, a glass reception desk, and potted trees. Ona had vanished. From behind a set of double doors came the sound of the thing being hidden: the metal-on-tile scrape of walkers and four-prong canes, a start-and-stop that suggested thoughts lost in mid-stride. Quinn’s mother, young and cancer-ridden, had died in a cut-rate model of a place like this. As a kid he’d managed to bear the humid odors of illness and age and the bus-station aesthetic of the day room; it was the off-key clanking of orthopedic hardware that stabbed him deepest, that arrhythmic, purposeless, ever-present percussion. Clank . . . rest . . . clank-clank-rest . . . He tried to assemble a tune out of the mess—a childhood habit—but no organizing principle unveiled itself.
The lobby was icily air-conditioned, and Belle was shivering, staring morosely at her shoes, which, now that he looked, weren’t an exact match. One had a round toe and the other a slightly less round toe. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she murmured. “Do you know what I’m doing?” She waited, as if Quinn, who could never answer easy questions—What time are you coming home?—could suddenly answer hard ones. “We’ll go home tonight if you want,” he said, soothingly. “I’ll get a room for Ona and drive back for her tomorrow.”
She was crying tearlessly, something he’d never once seen her do in the twenty years he’d known her. Was it true that a person could be all cried out? “I don’t want to go home,” she whispered. “I don’t want to be home. I don’t want to be anywhere.” She hid her face for a minute, but when she dropped her hands her eyes came up dry.
A tall, slender woman appeared out of nowhere. “I had an aide show your mother to the restroom,” she said. Quinn took in her long legs and painted toenails and strappy sandals. Low-cut blouse, smart little jacket—white but not nursey. Her earrings changed color as she moved her head.
Her name was Arianne. She offered them a corporate handshake and water from the cooler. “Are you thinking of a move for your mother?” she asked, collecting their drained cups.
“A move for my mother would be fabulous,” Belle said listlessly, “but first you’d have to pry her out of her house.”
Arianne gave Belle a whip-quick once-over, apparently rethinking the identity of the next Orchard Acres invitee.
“You’ll have to pardon me,” Belle said. “My son died.”
“I’m sorry,” Arianne said, abandoning her sales voice, not quite knowing where to look.
“She’s not our mother,” Quinn said. “She’s a friend of ours looking for someone who, I guess, lives here.” But he couldn’t come up with a name. There were no Vitkuses on the premises.
At last Ona reappeared, looking heat-soaked, crushed, sat on. “I would like to see Laurentas Stokes, please,” she said, all business, though her voice was fissured with fatigue. “Perhaps he’s a doctor here.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sakes,” Arianne said. Her laughter was filled with air. “You mean Larry.” She leaned into Quinn, having pegged him as the responsible party. “He still lives in B wing but spends afternoons over here. This is extended care. Worry-free care for your loved ones.” She glanced at Ona. “Are you a relative?”
“I gave birth to him,” Ona said, “if that’s what you mean.”
Arianne’s befuddled smile hung Cheshire-cat-like, unsupported by the rest of her face. Belle fidgeted on her feet as if the floor burned. “Follow me,” said Arianne, so they did, making a silent parade through the double doors and into the fluorescent realm beyond. Quinn took Ona’s arm, assaulted by doubt and worrying only at the point when to worry changed nothing—Belle’s long-standing accusation made manifest.
The day room was studded with parked wheelchairs claimed by squashed, staring people. Though Ona undeniably blended in, Quinn saw that she was just as exactly a thing apart. He thought of the body-snatcher movies, how clever the aliens’ disguises, but all the same you could just tell. “Which fellow is he?” she asked. She seemed greatly agitated, flinching in her skin.
“Right here,” Arianne said, somewhat wary. She led them a few paces away, to a rangy man in a high-tech chair near a large window that looked out on a courtyard. Around his neck hung a stethoscope and a pair of binoculars.
“Larry,” the woman said, touching his shoulder, “you have visitors.”
Larry turned around with effort, a sweet, mellow smile lighting his features. He had Ona’s wide forehead and charged eyes.
“What are you doing in here, Laurentas?” Ona demanded.
“Do I know you?”
She put her hands on her hips. “It’s Ona Vitkus.”
“Say again?”
“ONA VITKUS,” she repeated. “YOUR MOTHER.”
“Well, my gracious. So it is,” he said. His words slurred faintly. “My gracious me, what a surprise.”
“What are you doing in here?”
“I live here,” he said. “My gracious me.”
“He’s having a wonderful day, aren’t you, Larry?” Arianne said. “I’ll leave you all to catch up.” Her fading footfalls left Quinn bereft.
“I retired in ’92,” Larry was telling Ona. “My children all settled so far away.” He pointed across the cour
tyard. “That’s my place, the corner unit. Independent, you understand. They give me three squares a day in the dining room.”
Quinn dragged a chair to Ona, and to his relief she took it, though she made a point of perching on its edge. Was she trying to look young in front of her ancient son? Whatever her motive, it prompted in Quinn a jolt of affection.
“This is no place for a healthy man,” she said. “A doctor, up to his withers in sick people?”
Quinn sensed Belle at his back; her keen attention had a nearly musical quality, like a rest between measures.
“I had a little stroke last year,” Larry said calmly. He fiddled with his stethoscope. “But I still manage rounds from this chair.” He smiled around at his default patients, who exhibited varying levels of interest in the visitors. “They find me reassuring.”
Ona said, “I thought you moved to a condo, Laurentas. I live in a house.”
“It is a condo,” Larry said, confused. He pointed again. “I’ve been watching for the yellow-breasted chat,” he said then. “I had one yesterday. Unusual for here.” The courtyard had little paths, a bird-feeding station, and a lush topography of flowering bushes. Quinn craned his neck to see, though what a chat might look like he had no idea. The boy would know. The boy had been listing birds along with everything else. “The view’s better from over here,” Larry said.
Ona blinked at her son, looking miserable. An aide whisked in, carrying a tower of folded sheets, then disappeared behind another set of doors.
“I bet he was good-looking,” Belle whispered. She was gazing at him, enraptured. Quinn didn’t want to stay for this, whatever it was; everybody here at cross-purposes.
“I feed birds,” Ona said.
“Pardon?”
“I feed birds. IN MY OWN HOUSE. This fellow here comes to help me, although he’s finished now. Done with his duties. THIS FELLOW HERE.” Now everybody was looking at Quinn as if they expected him to pass out pills or examine their feet. He’d put on a new T-shirt this morning, and a freshly washed pair of jeans, and was suddenly glad.