All-Day Breakfast

by Adam Lewis Schroeder

  “I guess you guys are totally real,” I muttered.

  “They’re putting the horse in the boathouse,” said Ray.

  “Shamanski,” Josie corrected.

  “Yeah, so nobody can see him.”

  “Let’s go see him,” I said.

  But my hips and the small of my back were so stiff I could barely sit. I spat something orange onto the dirt between my legs. Ray squeezed his arms around my knee.

  “You’re dying?” he asked.

  Man, my head was spinning.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t look in that cooler, you with me? Don’t look in there.”

  “Okay,” said Josie.

  “Why not?” said Ray.

  They tugged my arm and I got up and started under the trees for the boathouse, though I felt like I was on stilts. The lake looked like gray shingles. I rubbed the back of Ray’s head and then Josie’s, like my fingers would evaporate if they ever weren’t touching my kids’ hair. The boathouse door stood open, a black square, but I was having trouble walking a straight line to get there—I kept watching for one of the women to step outside into the sun, but no sign.

  “Are you here for a long time?” asked Josie, an arm draped over my wrist.

  “Just until we go see Grandma in Pawnee. But we’ll stick together.”

  Ray squinted at me so hard that I had to steer him away from a tree.

  “There’s something gross in your pocket.” He pointed.

  Oh, I could’ve said, that’s part of a ninja’s brain, but if I had, it would’ve constituted Ray’s dinner conversation for the next ten years.

  “I told Grandma you weren’t going to find us, but it’s okay to be wrong.” Josie let her hair hang over her face, then flashed a smile as though I wouldn’t see it. “You look so weird with one arm. Are you going to a doctor?”

  “No,” I said.

  Though it was tough to walk straight with the toes gone, too. Neither of them had mentioned those.

  “You smell a bit like the bathroom garbage,” my daughter informed me.

  “You heard from Grandma Jackie?” I asked. “Did Evadare call?”

  Ray knotted invisible eyebrows. “Nobody’s supposed to know we’re here!”

  “Okay, okay, that’s good. I’ll call them in a minute.”

  We ambled onto the boathouse path, brown grass between the cobblestones, and even as I led my kids toward the weather-beaten walls I realized that the place was too quiet to be sheltering two women and a strange horse. It meant Penzler, though I’d seen him violently killed.

  “Hello?” I called.

  “Right here,” said Deb.

  So I led the kids in, touching one on the back of the head and then the other. The floorboards were sandy, the place still had its sweet, old mouldy smell, and a couple of the canoes had been moved against the wall to make room for Shamanski, who stood with his head down to better stare at a bucket of water.

  Deb sprang up from a hay bale, wrapped herself around my ribcage and squeezed, then swung her face up beside mine and didn’t do anything for a second. Then she kissed the point of my chin, since she couldn’t kiss the side of either ear like she used to.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Peter. And one arm.”

  Something purple trickled out of Shamanski’s eye and a dark seam ran up the back of his leg like it was going to split open. He shuffled forward a step, a shiver running through his wings, and I finally spotted Alice asleep in a wicker basket chair beneath the rack of canoe paddles. Her head had dropped back, her chin in the air and her scabbed-up arms stuck straight out on either side like a robot whose spring had run down. She had a big square scab on her temple, too, and the bullet hole through the knee of her jeans.

  I didn’t look across at her or at the kids hanging off my arm and think that I was about to lose them and had to run away again, even though there was an outside chance that swat teams were on the way. I thought, Things get better now, and plenty of things still to do.

  “I’d thought you could carry her up to the cookhouse,” said Deb, fidgeting with her glasses, “but—”

  “Can we feed him the hay?” asked Josie.

  “We tried, honey!” said Deb. “There’s twenty bales from archery up in the shed, and he wouldn’t even sniff them!”

  “We should get a pan of bacon started for her,” I said.

  “No!” Alice sat up, wild-eyed. “Give the horse the bacon!”

  “Oh, and this is for you,” I said, digging into my pocket.

  “I guess it’s weird I came without Lydia,” I said to the oncologist.

  “It’s not unheard of.” She clicked her four-color pen then put it back in her shirt pocket, beside a pen with a plastic fox for a lid. “What can I do for you?”

  So I went into the speech I’d been practicing at red lights and in the classroom while I wiped the whiteboards, unsuccessfully trying to stay scientific, without my voice catching, glue on my larynx: could I donate blood, bone marrow, a kidney? What about our friends? We had a hundred friends who said they’d help if they could, and I’d read two dozen papers on these stem cells that can—

  “Nothing like that.” The oncologist pulled her braid onto her shoulder then shrugged it off. “And I’d say if there were. All I can tell any patient’s partner is to go home and take care of them the best you can.”

  “You think I’m not taking care of her, seriously? You need to tell me that?”

  “Nothing like that—just sit down, Mr. Giller. All I meant is that you’re already doing everything possible.”

  “Well, I’m tired of making tea, okay, that doesn’t keep her—I mean, if I’m not willing to do something crucial for her, who is?”

  “All right.” She briskly cracked her knuckles, loud as a pistol shot in the mint-green room. “I don’t want to sound like the textbook but I really do understand how powerless you feel. In my own situation, I—wait, do you have medical training? You’re a teacher, yes?”

  “I started a biochem master’s. My mom has got a disease similar to Parkinson’s and I wanted to research that, but then, you know. Kids coming, needed an income. Seemed like there were already plenty of people getting nowhere as it was—though nowadays there’s ten times more cash for stem cells.”

  “Parkinson’s?”

  “Her specialist in Lincoln says it isn’t Parkinson’s exactly.”

  “Jesus, you’ve got it coming from all sides.”

  I stared at the faux-brass knob of her office door and willed my eyes to remain dry, because she was describing what I spent my waking hours actively not thinking about. What I thought while I was sleeping was beyond my control.

  “All I mean to say,” she went on, “was that I have a good idea of what’s going on inside my patients’ bodies, and even so I feel powerless a good percentage of the time, I still lose patients, so if you feel like your head is, I don’t know, a boiling kettle, you’re not alone.”

  “How many patients have you lost?”

  “It wouldn’t help you or Lydia to know that.”

  “I think she should be on oxygen,” I said.

  “It hasn’t metastasised to her lungs. There’s no sign of it there.”

  So that night I climbed into bed and like always I let Lydia jam her iceblock feet between my thighs, and as she slept she went right on dying. You spend your life trying to fix a thousand problems and you’re about as successful as a hole in the ground. How often are you actually handed the solution to any one of them?

  We’d never be old people who stood in their yard to endlessly contemplate the positioning of a sprinkler. I felt like I was minutes away from an empty bed, without her cold callused feet or her new musty smell that neither of us mentioned.

  “Thought you were getting out of bed,” she said through her sleep.

  Mond
ay, November 7.

  The sky was yellow-gray from the sun rising somewhere over the state of Missouri, and on the dash my wife’s square photo, veteran of a dozen battles now, shimmered with reflected light. Finally alone again, the four of us.

  Dear Lydia,

  Went into North Platte yesterday and traded your mom’s car for this Aerostar van in case that helps in disguising us. Plus I can only drive an automatic. The kids are still asleep but as soon as I see a truck stop we’ll go in for oatmeal and maple syrup. We made good time into Kansas, straight down 81 from Hebron, and the sugar canister was right where I’d buried it behind the cottonwood at the first rest-stop east of Salina on 70. I already phoned Pawnee to make sure that the people I’d hoped would be at Mom’s house really were there. I’d tried to make it obvious that once I abandoned them at Zagat’s they should hide themselves at Mom’s, I tried to make it obvious even while I couldn’t actually tell them I was leaving.

  Except for the ones who deserved it, I’m sorry for the people that I bashed around. I imagine a lot of those guys didn’t even like the job that put them in harm’s way, and they probably had families too. Penzler supposedly started the whole debacle with his family’s best interests in mind, so you see how cockeyed things get.

  Nothing on the radio about artillery fire outside of Preston, Ohio, which smells to me like the FBI just tidying their tracks. No mention of interstate manhunts either.

  I’ll probably never pass through Hoover again, and so never get a chance to punch Harv’s dad in the face. As lifelong regrets go I guess that’s not the worst. There are all of those kids I took to the Dockside plastics factory that will never get home and see their moms and dads, but I tell myself that I did my best on their behalf. But losing Harv that way, that’s hard to swallow. And his dad had so much more son than he deserved.

  Alice is cured too. She stands on the beach and paints watercolors, and they aren’t good. She bought Camp Lake Picu with the capital from one of her numbered Virgin Islands accounts or some such thing, and like buying a summer camp was not unusual. We need to put insulation in those places. I might take up oils myself, hokey as that sounds, and even if I suck the paint off my brushes, go crazy and cut my ear off like Vincent Van Gogh, it gives me a pleased shudder that without complicated medical intervention I would not be able to stick that ear back on. It would just lie there in the dirt, attracting flies.

  Just remembered, no ears. That’s a funny one to get used to.

  The medulla oblongata we saved for Shamanski might not have been enough to bring the old boy back around. He lies on his side, panting, syrupy stuff leaking from his grafts, and Deb and Alice take turns reading him My Friend Flicka. I haven’t been able to navigate shoelaces one-handed yet and may just wear these gumboots indefinitely. In the mirror I can see J doing that crazy sleep-thing with her fist, and R is whistling through his nose with the shoulder-belt across his face.

  Hope you’ve enjoyed this missive from my recently reconstituted brain, my dear.

  “Oh, so here you are!” Evadare said in the doorway. “When they first come I think, hey, nice if he would have called first, but now they’re here a week already!”

  I took her by the wrist. The house smelled of baking.

  “Where’s Colleen? Aren’t they here?”

  “They mope around!” said Evadare.

  I didn’t see anyone behind her in the house, though of course someone would be sitting behind the bead curtain.

  “But they’re healthy?” I asked. “They seem okay?”

  “Clint said today he had a sore foot. Too much dancing. Let me see these little ones!”

  I wore a black-and-gold Steelers knit cap, so she hadn’t noticed my ears, and she must’ve figured I had my right arm twisted behind me, waving to the kids or something—they were on either side of a blue-jay whirligig, seeing who could get their wing going faster. The bird tilted toward Ray then fell off its stick.

  “You win, Sunshine!” Josie lifted his hand like he was heavyweight champion.

  “Come give my hugs!” Evadare called.

  They thundered up the steps and wrapped around her calico thighs.

  “Where’s Colleen?” I asked.

  “Oh, they go out for walk every hour. They must know everyone in the countryside by now! And they are always in the garden shed, cooking their bacon—the smell was making her sick, it really was! And she got pimples, all that bacon cooked in the house, and she never even ate some!”

  I kept my hand in Ray’s hair.

  “She used to love bacon.”

  “Sure she did. I see it in her eyes when they cook it. What have you got here?”

  I carried my grocery bag to the dining room table.

  “We happened to be driving through Kansas,” I said. “So we stopped at the Czech bakery—”

  “Oh, in Wilson!” She clasped her hands to her chest. “You were in Wilson!”

  “Knedliky and kolaches!” shouted Ray, hopping in on one foot. “And we got prune for you!”

  She pressed his blond self to her hip. “Oh, I like the prune!”

  I crossed the living room—Josie stood in the midst of the bead curtain.

  “Hi, Gram-my,” she said, with the overly sweet delivery she’d picked up from Lydia. When your listener never responds it’s hard to know how to talk.

  “Mom,” I said, “hi. Thanks for looking after my cronies.”

  She seemed to straighten herself in the recliner. She wore a pink floral sweatshirt and a long black skirt, and her ankles didn’t look as bloated as the rest of her. They looked like they had in the Lincoln Sunken Garden, brushed by butterflies.

  “Has she eaten lunch?” I called back to Evadare.

  She had Ray on her knee beside the table, both of them munching away.

  “There is spinach broth in the fridge, you can feed it to her.”

  Josie kissed Mom’s cheek, then ran out so she wouldn’t miss the kolaches. I wiped Mom’s mouth and kissed the top of her head—the same floral conditioner as always. I stood back and imagined her feet settling to the floor, her thick hands gripping the arms of the chair, then my mom actually rising. Her eyes darted over me.

  “Yeah, I had trouble with my arm. I’ll tell you about it. Let me get your lunch. You’re going to like lunch.”

  My heart beat loud and fast in my ears. I rustled back out through the curtain.

  “What is in this Tupperware?” Evadare picked through the grocery bag. “Is it custard?”

  “Can we have it now?” asked Ray. “I’ll share!”

  “It isn’t custard,” I said, because it was Natalia. “I’d better pop that in the fridge.”

  I took the container from Evadare and she commenced brushing pastry from the kids’ laps. I heard the front door open, so I leapt around the corner and they were coming inside just as I’d left them, Colleen in her tracksuit, Megan in her cardigan, Clint in that jean jacket and scarf. The Averys had Clint’s arms around their shoulders, his foot dangling over the floor like he’d broken his leg. They looked up at me, eyes wide and black with bright daylight through the screen door behind them.

  “My ankle.” Clint heaved in a breath. “It’s going, it’s fucked.”

  “Don’t move.” I held up my hand like a traffic cop. “I’ll get spoons.”

  Colleen followed me into the panelled kitchen.

  “I’m sorry again that I left you there,” I said. “I don’t think I can explain.”

  She forced her mouth into a frown, then put her face against my shoulder and wrapped herself around me. She was shorter than I’d remembered. I put my arm around her too and squeezed tight, her shoulder blades against my forearm. Her heart thudded against my ribs.

  Megan appeared beside us, her hair in anemic braids.

  “Is this it? Give me the spoon!”

  “Tell h
im it’ll taste like mustard.”

  “Hurry up,” Clint said from the hall. “I don’t care if it tastes like shit!”

  “Don’t say shit in front of these two!” called Evadare.

  “Are these your kids, Mr. G?” called Clint. “They look like you.”

  “And we have to divvy it three ways,” Megan muttered as she strode out to him.

  “Should I tell them it’s two ways?” I asked Colleen.

  She gazed up at me. The curtains’ shadow gave her face a spider-web texture.

  “I could tell on the phone that you’d figured it out,” she murmured. “When you said it wasn’t the pink stuff after all.”

  “And you never ate a hot dog.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, god,” Megan gasped from the hallway. “It’s so gross!”

  “Not even a veggie dog. Jeez,” I said, “I’d really thought I was living clean.”

  “Eat it all,” said her mother.

  I put my chin on the top of her head.

  “I called Doug’s sister,” she said. “They’re having a funeral up in Fremont.”

  “Are you going?”

  “Is it safe to?”

  “I guess we’ll—”

  “Jesus, look at you.” She lifted off my cap and I tried not to flinch as the bare sides of my head met open air. “You look like something shat you out.”

  “Thank you. Appreciate it.”

  “Lucky for you the Masonic Express dropped us right in the driveway, or I’d have a foot up your ass.”

  “Anyone alive enough to mouth the words, ‘I am lucky,’ is lucky.”

  “Listen to you, with your brain.”

  I leaned back against the counter. “I need to feed my mom lunch.”

  “Need help?”

  I shook my head. After a second she swallowed, brushed hair out of her eyes and looked grimly at the fridge.

  “We heard about PBF,” she said slowly. “It’s still on the news here every day, not one survivor.” She squeezed the back of her neck. “Did you know all about that before you went?”