by Ashley Ream
He had wondered at the time how sideways it could go and if she meant to call her rather than 911 if it came to that. Harry didn’t know much about this sort of thing, but he was pretty sure scientists weren’t supposed to go handing out medications just like that. He didn’t ask her what she meant. He didn’t want her to have to answer if having to answer put her in an awkward position. He felt the two of them had entered into a pact. He had accepted the risk, and he would not rat if the odds did not turn out in his favor.
He had asked her when she was writing down the number what was on the agenda that night, and she had told him it was her turn to take the kayak out with the plankton nets for offshore collection.
“Don’t drown,” he’d said, meaning it as a joke. She’d nodded as though this were a serious instruction and was gone before he had time to follow up.
He wasn’t at all sure he would like being out in a kayak at night. The island got very dark very quickly in winter. In town, there were shops that sold a joke postcard. It was all black, and in small white type it said, “Nightlife on Olloo’et Island.” That black extended up to the heavens and down to whatever monster-ridden depths the ocean held. No, being out on a kayak in all that blinding inky-ness was not for Harry at all, and he was glad to be in his warm, bright house on shore.
At the top of the stairs, he knocked on her door and tried her name again.
When nothing stirred, it was a conundrum. This was his house, and under that reasoning, he should be able to open any door to any room he wanted. On the other hand, he had given her permission to use this room as her own, not just as a bedroom but as a work space, which was, to Harry, even more sacred. This permission extended to her certain rights of privacy.
Harry knocked again. “Rachel?”
It wasn’t so much that she didn’t respond as that he heard nothing at all. He put his hand on the doorknob and then, hoping for a way out, remembered to check over his shoulder to see if the door to the bathroom was perhaps closed and occupied. That would explain everything and make him feel both relieved and silly. Who wouldn’t prefer to come back to the house in the middle of a cold, wet shift to use an indoor bathroom rather than those horrible plastic porta-potties?
“Rachel!”
She was climbing the second set of stairs. He saw her—the last bits of her anyway—disappear around the banister. He saw her dark hair swish down her back and her hand grip the rail.
How had she gotten past him? How did he not hear her on the wooden floors? Why had she not responded, and why was she going up to the third floor? There was nothing up there but Tilda’s room and bath and a little storage nook. It had been designed for a live-in housekeeper, if you were the sort of person who had such a thing. It was an attic, really. And if he had limited rights in entering Rachel’s temporary quarters, she had none at all that allowed her into Tilda’s space.
Harry was confused, of course, but also he was just a little bit angry, just on the fringes, happy to have it explained away but far enough in that it had better be a very good explanation. He went after her, moving more quickly and not bothering—not even remembering—to hold on to anything at all down the hallway, and while his hand did rest on the rail as he ascended the second set of stairs, he took them like a man would take them, alternating feet on alternating risers, and he didn’t take a moment to think of that at all.
She was waiting for him there at the top of the stairs, not at the very top but at the landing so that he didn’t see her until he was all the way up and had rounded the final baluster.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said, getting it all out before looking her in the eye, which is when all the air went out of him and his blood stopped flowing and his bowels felt loose.
“Oh, my God.”
20.
“Becca?” It was a question, but it was not a question because, for whatever terrible thing she had been through to be there, it was Becca. A man knows his daughter even like that, in the state that she was and all grown up.
She still had that terrible gash on the side of her face. He remembered it from the accident. Something, he did not know what, had sheared right through the skin and through the muscle and flayed it all open like something on a butcher’s table until the white bone of her cheek could be seen, unmistakable and clear. God, how it had bled. It had pumped out right there in the front seat of the car. He had seen it, but he couldn’t reach her, and he couldn’t stop it, and there was so much blood around them both, he was sure that the whole car would fill with blood, that it would fill up the floorboard and then up to the seats and then up to the windows, and they would drown in it there was so much.
Of course, she was bleeding in other places, too. Her right hand had been nearly severed, and she was bleeding into her guts, but trapped in the car those years ago, he couldn’t see those things. He had only seen her cheekbone, a part of his daughter he should never have seen, not if he had lived a hundred lifetimes.
It had been twenty years, and her face had not healed and neither had her hand. Harry saw it now. It was hanging from her wrist, still attached by a little bit of muscle and a little bit of skin and gristle and whatever else holds us together. It hung there off its hinge like a broken door on the end of her arm. And the bleeding had not stopped. It had not stopped in twenty years, and he had not been wrong. If the firemen and the police and the ambulance and the life flight helicopter and all the rest of them had not come, the car would have filled all the way to the top with her blood. He could see that now. She had so much of it. More than any other person had ever had.
“Becca.”
“Dad.”
She called him Dad. She had always called him Dad, even when she was very small. She was no-nonsense that way, like her mother. No Daddy for her. He remembered that about her. She had been born so frank and straightforward. She was full of “whys” and demanded clear explanations of the things in her world, things that she could touch and feel and know were true.
She was not a child for unicorns and fairy princesses, preferring games and books and teddy bears because bears were real animals that she could see in the zoo, and she had not particularly cared for her little brother. Not when he was born, which was to be expected, and not even three years later when she would die. She had never warmed to him. It wasn’t that Harry or Tilda thought she might hurt him. Becca simply did not like him. He got in her way and interrupted her play and got the attention she would rather not have shared. And the truth of the matter was that when she was gone, it had always seemed that Juno was free of something and had grown to take up as much of the space his sister had abandoned as possible.
Of course, Harry knew this was not real. Even though she was right there and the blood was on the floor around her and he could smell the iron in it. He knew this was not real, and so he told her. He needed to be clear with her and with himself.
“I know you’re not here.”
Becca looked around herself. She looked at the small landing where they stood and behind her into Tilda’s room. Tilda had left the door half-open and a lamp on inside. Tilda always left lights on, even in the middle of the day. When they were married, she used to say that she hated coming home to a dark house. It made her sad, and so Harry had stopped turning off all the lights she turned on.
When Becca had seen all that she could see from the spot where she was rooted, she looked down at herself. She was wearing jeans and dark blue wellies and a hooded sweatshirt with a logo on the front Harry did not recognize. Her hair was back in a ponytail, and were it not for those terrible wounds, Harry would have sworn she was home for a holiday break from whatever graduate school she had chosen. Surely, she would have gone to graduate school. An MBA or a JD or maybe she would be thinking about a PhD. She had been the sort of girl who would become the sort of woman who would think about doing that.
“Then where am I?” she asked.
“What?” Harry had distracted himself thinking about the young woman in fro
nt of him and what she would be doing if she were really and truly there and alive.
“If I’m not here, then where am I?”
“You’re in my imagination,” Harry said. “I’m imagining you.”
“Why?”
Harry should have seen that coming. The girl with all the “whys.”
“Because I am very sick. I’m going to die, too, pretty soon. So I imagine that’s why. Maybe I think that when I die, I’ll see you again wherever you are. Maybe my brain is practicing for that moment. This is the sort of thing you should practice for, don’t you think?”
“My room isn’t up here,” she said.
The practicality of it pulled him from his thoughts. They were the first thoughts he had had of his own death that weren’t all cold and full of blanks.
“No, your room is on the second floor.”
“Why are Mom’s things up here?”
“We’re not together anymore, but she came back to be with me while I die.”
“Why are you dying?”
“My brain doesn’t know how to tell my muscles what to do anymore. My legs and my hands don’t work so well most of the time—but I took something, and I’m a little better tonight. Most of the time it’s very painful. And eventually my brain won’t be able to talk to my lungs or my heart either, and that will be that.”
Becca took a moment to think about that, and then she started to move. She was not rooted to the spot after all. She walked right toward him, right past him there on the landing, and she put her hand on the rail, and she started down the stairs. Harry would have sworn—he would absolutely have sworn—that the air moved when she went by, that it moved and tickled the hairs on his arm just below the shirtsleeves he’d pushed up earlier that night.
He was going to follow her, of course he was. He would follow her down the stairs and out of the house and across the way and around the world if that was where she was going, but before he did, Harry took three steps forward. The pool of blood that collected around her feet was still there on the hardwood floor. He was glad it was not real, could not possibly be real, because there was a terrible lot of it, and it would seep into the grain and the very cellular structure of the wood, getting right down under the stain, and it would stay there forever, and no one could bear such a thing in their home. When she had walked away, she had walked through it. She had gotten the imaginary blood on the bottoms of her imaginary wellies and left imaginary and garish footprints across the landing and to the stairs and down the stairs, each one getting lighter and lighter the farther from the pool she had gone.
And while he did not want to, he had to. Harry took those three steps to the edge of the pool, and he put the toe of his house shoe into the pool and pulled it out again, streaking it across the floor. It did what real blood would do, obeying all the laws of physics and hydrodynamics and whatever other laws there were that he did not understand. The blood clung to his shoe, and it made a mark across the floor, and it was on him again. After twenty years, his daughter’s blood was on him, and it was a very good thing that this was not real because that is the sort of thing that kills a man. Harry thought that very clearly. There was no doubt at all. If this were real, it would be the sort of thing that kills a man.
Harry was unsteady, a sort of tremble going all through him like shaking a pan of Jell-O. But he could not think too much about that right then because Becca had moved out of his sight, and that, more than anything that happened that night, scared him. Now that he had seen her, he wanted to never not see her again. And when he took the stairs after her, he took them faster than he had taken any stairs in more than a year and a half.
The next landing was empty, and this time when he put his hand to Rachel/Becca’s door, it did not occur to him to hesitate.
“Becca?”
He saw the clothes on the floor and the tanks and the lights and the equipment that hummed and the electrical cords that snaked across the floor plugging into a half-dozen power strips that plugged into yet others. He saw them, but he did not see them because none of it told him where Becca was.
“Becca!”
Down again to the main floor. Shooby was waiting for him at the base of the stairs wearing the face he wore when something had gone wrong in his world—a missed walk or an imminent trip to the vet. Harry walked right past him and made a circuit of the whole floor.
Kitchen.
“Becca?”
Dining room.
“Becca?”
Library.
Parlor.
Storage closet.
Bathroom.
Garage.
“Becca?”
He tried the closet by the door where he hung his coat, and when that and all else had failed him, he went out onto the deck, leaving the door to the warm, golden, glowing house open behind him, and he yelled out to the bay.
But the bay did not answer him, and the sound of the water and the wind stole his voice so that not even the workers on the beach not so far away and just beyond the yellow tape heard any sound. There was nothing that Harry could do, but still he stood there in the cold dark until the wind-blown mist that was, he knew, the harbinger of a bigger storm soaked his shirt through and stuck his thinning hair to his head and collected on his eyelashes. He stood there until he started to shake, and a tingle under his skin—in his foot and in his hands—told him that the pain was going to come back and was already on its way. Only then did he go inside. His good sense told him to do it while he still could.
* * *
When Tip finally kissed her on the mouth, Tilda could taste herself on his lips and tongue, and she wondered if it had been an older woman who had taught him. Maybe young men had become better at things since she was a young woman. Maybe the proliferation of porn had done some good in the world, she thought, although she doubted it. An older woman, one who had come before her, made the most sense to Tilda, and if her nearly empty glass of prosecco were close at hand, she would have raised it in thanks to the unknown woman.
After the sandwiches and the wine, Tilda and Tip had not made it back upstairs. They were on the couch in the living room where she had once sat with Tip’s parents and Harry playing cards. They had set up a folding table right over there, and Tip’s mother had served salmon dip with crackers. Tilda had no idea why she remembered details like that from so long ago, but there it was. Salmon dip with crackers. The Feingolds had left the television on while they all played, which the men kept turning their heads to watch and which Tilda had found irritating.
The TV across the room from her now was new, a flat screen that hung on the wall, but the couch they were lying on might have been the same from that time. Tilda couldn’t remember. She gave a shiver that had nothing to do with the memories, and Tip reached up and pulled the throw draped over the back of the couch over the both of them.
“Where did you go?”
“I was thinking about your mother’s salmon dip,” Tilda said, wondering why men always wanted to keep their houses so cold. Did they not feel it? Did they really not notice? Or was it being cheap? She felt the same way about lights. Why the insistence that the light above you be the only one on in the whole house?
“I didn’t know my mother made salmon dip,” Tip said.
“It was just the once.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t have enough blood in my brain yet to make sense,” Tilda said.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Tilda let him but didn’t offer up anything else. She didn’t think it was ever good to let a man think he had nothing left to strive for. She had closed her eyes, but she didn’t remember deciding to do that. She had just blinked, and then opening them again seemed too much trouble. It was fine with her. She was happy to stay right there with Tip under the blanket drunk with food and sex.
“So,” Tip said.
“So what?” She kept her eyes closed. It didn’t seem like the sort of question that required visual input.
&
nbsp; “So what are your plans?”
Tilda scrunched her eyebrows. Was she supposed to have plans? Were they going somewhere later? She decided to open her eyes. Tip was on his side, his head balanced on one crooked arm and his other thrown over her body. It was nice, but it didn’t make the situation any clearer.
“Sorry,” she said. “I feel like I missed a step.”
“You’re going to be on Olloo’et for a while, right?”
“I assume so.”
Tilda really hadn’t thought about a concrete timeline. She was here for Harry for as long as he needed her. She’d given up her apartment in D.C. and sold the house in Seattle, which had become far too big for just her. Half the nights she was home, it seemed like it had grown since the last time she was in it, as if rooms were added and enlarged when she wasn’t looking. She felt like a marble rolling around inside the bed of a pickup when she was in that house. Sometimes she walked into a room just to have been in it, just to check on things because it had been awhile. The house had become depressing. She was glad it was gone. Maybe she’d buy a loft or one of those little two-bedroom, craftsman-style bungalows. She’d always kind of liked those, even if the windows were too small.
All of that was in the future at some indeterminate time. Thinking about when—exactly—meant thinking about Harry’s death, which she didn’t want to think about at all.
“So what are you going to do while you’re here?” Tip asked.
“I’m taking care of Harry.”
“That doesn’t sound like a full-time job.”
“More than you’d think. He can’t live alone—even if he would rather. That’s why he called me. I was the caregiver of last resort.”