The 100 Year Miracle

by Ashley Ream

  “And yet, here you are with me.”

  “Well, he doesn’t need me twenty-four seven. At least not yet.”

  “He will?”

  “Probably. Eventually. He isn’t going to get better.”

  “So you’re just going to sit around and wait for him to get worse?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Tip looked at her, waiting for her to fill in her plans, which irritated her more than might have been reasonable. She had always been a person with plans. She had plans and planners and color-coded schedules. The plans came from goals, and Tilda had always had goals, which was why she always had plans. She’d had goals for herself and goals for her children and even goals for Harry, when they’d been married. But here she was, a woman neither young nor old, whose greatest goal—greatest success—was behind her, and if she wasn’t going on to something bigger, and she really didn’t think she was, then what would she plan for now? She had no idea, and having Tip point that out while he was still young and achieving with a whole mountain range full of peaks ahead of him that he could climb—well, he was just pissing her off. What did he know about anything?

  “I’m fixing up a boat,” Tilda said because it was true, and it was something at least.

  “A boat?” Tip said it like he’d never heard of such a thing.

  “A sailboat, a small one. Maybe eighteen feet.”

  “I didn’t know you knew about boats.”

  “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

  If Tip got the reference, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  “What will you do with the boat once you’ve fixed it?”

  “I’ll take it out.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Why not?”

  “I just thought you might be looking to start a business or something.”

  “A boat business?”

  “You’re the one who brought up the boat.”

  Tilda laughed a not-real laugh. “Like what? I’m going to give three-hour tours?”

  Tip didn’t acknowledge that reference either.

  “I’m just saying you can be something more than Harry’s caregiver.”

  She did need to be something more than Harry’s caregiver eventually. She would have to buy a loft or a bungalow and decide what to do with herself in the coming years. But deciding such a thing meant thinking about a world without Harry, and it did not honor—did not honor at all—how important taking care of Harry was. His would not be a good death. Harry would not live to eighty-five and then have a brain aneurysm while gardening. He wouldn’t be one of those people about whom it is said, “He just fell over and died, couldn’t even wait for the ambulance to arrive.” Harry would come apart slowly. He already was. He would lose more and more movement. He would be bedridden. Then his speech would go and then his breath. He’d worked out a DNR order with Dr. Woo. Harry had told her before she moved in and had insisted that she agree. Knowing these things, it felt very important to take care of Harry while taking care of Harry still did him some good.

  It was important for her, too, for the part of her that had healed after their family had come apart, healed but with a large, jagged keloid scar that, with more regularity than she’d like to admit, she rubbed up against, picked at, and wished was something other than what it was.

  She’d probably been lost in her head for a while because Tip asked, “Do you mind if I turn on the Daily Show?”

  The card game all over again.

  “Sure,” she said. “I need to get home anyway.”

  “You don’t have to go.”

  “I think I do.”

  21.

  It had taken a long time for Rachel to walk from the house to the tent. She’d had to be careful picking her way through the brambles and driftwood and rocks. She was having trouble judging depth and distances, so she concentrated very hard, and then it occurred to her that maybe she had been walking a long time, a very long time. Maybe an hour had passed crossing that short distance from the bottom of the stairs to the tent, and everyone had watched her do it. But she knew that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Rachel told herself not to think about it.

  Hooper, agitated, kept touching the outside of his pants pocket, patting it and squeezing the fabric like a sort of nervous tic.

  “On top of everything, I can’t find my damn phone,” he said.

  He touched his pocket again to no avail, and Rachel had the idea that they were halfway through a talk rather than at the beginning of one, which was concerning.

  “When did you last have it?” Rachel asked, trying to concentrate harder on what he was saying.

  “I was at the camp answering more damn e-mails from the compliance department. Maybe I had it after that. I don’t remember.”

  The compliance department was in charge of tracking all of the grant money that came into the university, ensuring it was used only for its designated purpose and riding the researchers to turn in time sheets, data records, proof of performance documents, and whatever else the grantor decided they wanted that week. The fact that Hooper was getting more than a few e-mails from them was not, Rachel knew, a good sign.

  She was sitting on a folding chair under the tent. She had taken off her shoes and was stepping into an olive green pair of waders, a combination of rubber boots and pants that came up under her armpits and was held up by suspenders. She had to be careful. They were too big for her, and putting them on was unwieldy. They would suddenly grow much longer and sprout new legs, so that they were waders for an octopus. It helped to close her eyes when that happened and feel her way into them. They were uncomfortable, even with her arms and legs in the right places. She didn’t like the rubber wrapping around her, but she would have to push her kayak out a bit into the bay until the water was deep enough. She didn’t want to do that in jeans.

  Earlier, Rachel had told Hooper about the lock that had been broken on the pickup. She had used it to justify her reasons for moving out of the camp. The equipment would be safer with someone right here looking down on it, even during the small spaces between shifts.

  He had come within a sentence of ordering her back to the camp but had stopped short. Rachel had forced her face and voice to appear calm and to offer nothing but the most well-reasoned arguments, arguments that had nothing whatsoever to do with John, even while her heart pounded and she sweated inside her clothes. If it came down to it, Rachel would outright defy Hooper, but she did not want to. And it seemed, from her end, that he did not want to be in a position to outright order something that might be outright defied, forcing everybody to retreat to their fortified positions. He tried to convince her to stay at the camp. She resisted. He became frustrated, and his frustration agitated her. Hooper had always been on her side. He valued what she valued, worked the way she worked, and overlooked shortcomings that others would not. She had relied on him, but now being around Hooper felt like putting a shoe on the wrong foot.

  Rachel had finished suiting up, managing to get all of her parts in the right parts and all the buckled bits together. With a steadying breath, she collected her plankton net, notebooks, collection bottles, and all the other ephemera she would need out on the kayak. She was anxious to get on the water and to distance herself from Hooper’s disappointment, to give her eyes a chance to see nothing but the darkness of the sky and the glow of the water. She just needed a little time and was stepping out of the tent, awkward in her big rubber pants, when she heard him yell after her.

  “Bell! Hang on.”

  Rachel turned, hoping for the best but not expecting it. He did not usually call her by her last name.

  “Give those waders to Marcus. I want you to preserve the catch the others bring in.”

  “Have you assigned anyone to check the ADCPs?” she tried. It wasn’t as good an assignment as the kayak collection work, but it would be better than being stuck under the tent.

  “I’ll do that,” Hooper said. “You do the formalin solution, and don’t forget to note
the information from the flow meters.”

  “I—” she started.

  “Formalin,” Hooper repeated.

  “Right,” Rachel said and began to unbuckle the suspenders.

  * * *

  Tilda held the front door open for Shooby, who was whining and pacing at her feet.

  “Well, go out, if you need to go out.”

  Shooby looked up at her and cried but refused to cross the threshold.

  “Look, pup. No one else in this house is allowed to be crazy at the moment. The crazy list is all full, so if you need to go out, go out.” Tilda leaned down and gave his hind end a shove, but he dug in his paws.

  “Okay fine. Don’t go. But if you pee on the floor, you’re going to have to figure out a way to clean it up.”

  Tilda shut the door and headed into the kitchen with Shooby at her heels. She put the bouquet of white flowers and wild greenery in a vase she found in the first cabinet she opened, which was where she used to keep the vases. It was a small, pleasant surprise not to have to search. The vase was a nice one, yellow ceramic with a scalloped edge. She filled it halfway with water and then decided to water herself and poured a small glass of orange juice, which reminded her she had to pee. She did that in the little half bathroom between the kitchen and the garage, which had the same soaps she’d seen earlier that day, the lavender ones in the floral paper. She had been right. She really didn’t care for them that much. They made her hands smell like powdery old ladies.

  When she came back out, she flipped through the mail on the kitchen table, even though it wasn’t hers, and then she looked through a catalogue that had nothing but men’s clothes while she drank her juice. She rinsed the glass and left it in the sink, and only when she’d done all of that and probably some other things that she had forgotten, did she pick up the vase with the flowers and carry it up the two flights of stairs to her bedroom.

  Tilda remembered all of this because it seemed that all of it was horrible. Each of those was a terrible thing to be doing while Harry lay on the floor upstairs waiting for her to rescue him.

  “Harry!”

  Harry was on his side right in front of her bedroom door with his arms and his legs curled up like a roly-poly bug trying to close its shell. And when she went down on her knees beside him, setting the flowers on the ground, she could feel that his clothes were damp like they had not quite finished in the dryer.

  “What happened?”

  He opened his eyes. “You’re home.”

  “What happened?”

  “I couldn’t stand up anymore, so then I sat down. I thought you’d be home soon, but when you weren’t, I decided to lie down. What time is it?”

  “Why are your clothes wet? Where’s your cane?”

  “I left it in the library.”

  “You walked up the stairs without your cane?”

  “I was feeling better for a moment. But the moment passed. I didn’t get to take a shower.”

  “Did you try to take a shower with your clothes on? Is that why they’re wet?”

  Harry turned down the corners of his mouth. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Why did you come all the way up here?” Tilda asked.

  “I thought I saw something.”

  “How could you think you saw something up here?”

  “I don’t know. I just did. It wasn’t here when I got here.”

  “What wasn’t here?”

  Harry closed his eyes again, tight this time, like the question was too overwhelming and more than a little irritating, just too much for one human to demand of another.

  “Harry?”

  He was still curled up, and she knew his hip and shoulder must hurt him and probably some other parts as well. Her knees already hurt, and she’d just gotten there.

  “I’m going to call Dr. Woo.” Tilda started to get up, but Harry’s arm shot out and grabbed her leg.

  “No, you’re not.”

  Shooby let out another whine.

  “Harry, something’s going on. This is why you brought me here.”

  “I did not bring you here to tattle on me.”

  “I’m not—”

  “I said no.”

  Tilda looked down at him and wondered if this show of temper meant something. She would mention it to Dr. Woo. That’s how she was thinking of Harry there on the floor, like a list of symptoms that needed to be reported to the proper authorities for cataloging. There was probably some sort of software she could use for this, a cell phone application, for keeping track.

  “If you don’t stop that,” Harry said, “you can damn well leave.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop looking at me like that.”

  “You want me to leave? You want me to get up and leave you here on the floor? How do you think that ends for you?”

  “Rachel will be back.”

  “Yes, of course, Rachel. Let’s trust your health and safety to a complete stranger. I’m sure she’ll make you a priority, much better than your family is doing.”

  “You’re not my family.”

  “I’m the only damn family you’ve got, so shut your mouth.”

  “There’s Juno,” Harry said.

  “You want me to call him?” Tilda said. “He can come out here and take care of you?”

  Harry sneered.

  There it was, Tilda thought. They were the sort of parents who threatened each other with the company of their only child. What a success they were. Tilda sat back and leaned against the balustrade. “So what do you want?”

  Harry didn’t say anything for a while, and Tilda wasn’t sure if it was because he was thinking about it or because he was testing out the silent treatment. Her mind drifted to Juno and his girlfriend and what kind of parents they would turn out to be, and when Harry spoke, it interrupted her thoughts.

  “I want to get in my bed.”

  “Fine. We can start there.”

  Tilda moved the vase of flowers out of both of their way, did a deep knee bend, and, from that position, wrapped her arms around Harry’s chest. He’d pushed himself up to his elbow, and she got him up and over onto his butt. Once he was sitting, she went around behind him, went down deep, and braced herself again.

  “When I get you up,” she said, “you grab the railing there and stabilize yourself.”

  He made a noise that didn’t mean anything to her.

  “Can you do that?” she asked, still in her deep bend like a frog about to make a leap.

  “Just do it,” Harry said.

  “Yes, your highness,” Tilda said and heaved.

  She got him up and standing on his own two feet, even if half his weight was on the railing. She thought about leaving him there and going to fetch his cane, but he didn’t seem like he was in much shape to go down a flight on his feet. What he needed was one of those motorized chairs that go up and down along a track. Tilda promised herself that she’d look into that, but he was in no mood to discuss it then.

  “All right,” she said, moving around to his right side. “You’re going to put half your weight on me. We’ll try to go down that way.”

  “I can’t move my right leg much just now,” Harry said.

  “Is it all right to drag it?” she asked.

  “Unless you plan on cutting it off, I don’t see a way around it.”

  “Okay then. On the count of three.”

  22.

  Harry had lost thirty pounds or more since he had gotten sick, but a grown man who had lost thirty pounds was still a grown man. It had taken everything Tilda had to keep them both upright going down the stairs. They had taken a lot of breaks, and there was one point when she was afraid she was going to lose her balance and send them both ass over tea kettle. But there they were.

  She’d gotten Harry down to the second floor. He needed to use the bathroom, but he had yet to install any grab bars, which was something else Tilda added to her to-do list. His pride allowed only so much, so Tilda left him there, holding on to the coun
tertop while she went to fetch his cane. It took him a while, but he managed to get himself over to the toilet, down, and back up again. Or at least he told her he did. She stood outside in the hallway on the other side of the shut door.

  He let her help him into bed and to remove his khaki pants and cardigan sweater, shoes, and socks. He kept his boxers and his T-shirt on. His right foot was turned in, and his calf and thigh muscle on that side were already shrinking from disuse. His skin, unable to cope with the rapid change and too old to be very elastic anyway, hung a bit around his ruined parts. His bicep, too, was nearly gone, not any bigger than his forearm. His right hand was like his right foot, no longer in the shape it should have been.

  Tilda thought she’d want to turn away from these things, that it would be painful to see her former husband like that—ruined, disabled, deformed. But it didn’t bother her, at least not in that way. Seeing the wounds on his body rather than just hearing about the causes of them in his nervous system made Harry seem vulnerable to her. You didn’t blame a wounded bird for pecking at you when you tried to help it.

  Tilda covered him with a blanket and turned out the light. In the corner of his room was a wooden chair. It had one of those seat cushions that tie with little bows in back, which was not the sort of thing she would like, but just then she was grateful for it. Her body had been through enough that night. A little cushion was what she needed.

  “Aren’t you going to bed?” he asked.

  It was dark enough that Tilda couldn’t really see him, only the lumpy black outline of him and the bed, just slightly darker than everything around it. He did not want her to call Dr. Woo, and she had not. But she wasn’t at all confident in that decision. She needed to see how things would go, at least for a little while, before she could close her eyes. Heaven forbid something worse than a fall happened while she was asleep.

  “I will in a little bit,” she said. “I’m just going to sit here and rest for a while.”

  “I’m fine,” Harry said.

  “I know you are.”

  Shooby took up his position by the bed, head on paws. He wasn’t sleeping either.