Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  He writes, June 12, 2018, and pauses.

  He’s forgetting, and faster with each day it seems. Her notes remind him of the little stickers in all of their windows, opaque maple leaves that are supposed to warn the birds, and yet they stubbornly keep slamming into the glass, a desperate act not unlike when he caught Lil abandoning the tubes and portable oxygen tank to wander out onto the porch to smoke. “Just one,” she said. “One little puff.”

  Frank is tired of desperation, tired of forgetting.

  Several times now he has skipped an appointment and instead driven to see his childhood home and the train tracks where his father died over seventy years ago. The last time he went, he felt guilty deceiving Lil; she had waved a Post-it note at him: Appointment. Today. Cardiology. Her ability to remember the present was completely eclipsed by the past—filled with the minutiae of the past—while the present was a trail of notes that resembled a board game, which took them to lunch and then to dinner, to pay a bill, watch a movie, with spurts of television news or a call from one of their kids or the knock of a neighbor he likely did not care to see in between. That particular day, he had come home to more notes: The doctor called. You missed your appointment. Where were you? Advance two steps. Do not pass go.

  They say he needs a valve replacement. His daughter hounds him about that valve replacement, no longer willing to accept his excuses of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” because she says it is broke; it does need to be fixed. They say it is so much better these days, that his is like an old rusty screen door, though he and Lil had grown used to hearing it years ago, the rhythmic ticking.

  “We will always remember this,” Lil sometimes said with a quiet, calm resolve that assured him that the two of them were in a good place. She signed her notes with the little face that made them both laugh, a face that looked like The Scream—round eyes and oval mouth; it was their daughter’s trademark as a four-year-old, her archaeological signature, her “Kilroy was here,” and she left it everywhere, crayoned behind drapes, scratched into the arm of the leather sofa, penciled inside books and on her bedroom door. Becca was the child always documenting and remembering, begging for souvenirs everywhere they went—little license plates with her name, snow globes, cheap dolls. Her drawers were filled with rocks and feathers and leaves and bottle caps. She loved to hide little pieces of Halloween candy everywhere, so she continued to eat it well into November.

  Jeff had been just the opposite. Money. All he wanted was money. He set up lemonade stands and mowed yards; he filled more savings-stamps books than anyone else in their elementary school. He sold his Halloween candy or whatever else he could take to school without getting caught (firecrackers and cherry bombs), though he often did. Frank hadn’t wanted to think about what that meant for Jeff’s high school years, though he suspected condoms or marijuana or perhaps black-market exams. Lil praised his entrepreneurial spirit, and Frank tried not to go there, knowing he would lose his temper and make matters worse. Even now, the differences between the two are extreme: Becca, in her sleek modern home and now-happy marriage, a popular divorce lawyer, and Jeff, financially very successful doing whatever it is he does with technology but never really sinking roots, and needing his sister’s legal advice way too many times. Lil said the new woman in his life is age-appropriate and very promising, but who knows; that’s what they say every time. Who knows.

  Frank draws the little face out of habit and then stares at it.

  He once dared to flip open one of Lil’s many notebooks, only to find dates and moods, as if she were charting the weather, page after page of her emotional forecast: Cold and blue, but that’s November—too many memories that come and pull up a chair and refuse to leave. He flipped quickly, because he could hear her in the hall closet and knew she would return any second. He flipped, thinking surely he would read his own name, surely his presence would fill her notebook. He found hopeful and grateful, but then there was also lonely, overwhelmed, and sad, emotions she expressed so rarely. She had doodled little things and then x-ed them out. X marks the spot. You are here. And x equals the unknown, what is missing, a mistake, as well as a kiss.

  The little face was off to the side, shocked mouth a perfect o.

  Next to the face he’s drawn, he writes the word—their word—and says how sorry he is to break his promise, that he’s impatient and ready, that he hopes Lil is right and there’s something beyond it all, but even if there isn’t, it’s better than just sitting around and waiting for the inevitable and feeling like a burden, fearing the disgrace and disgust that often comes with the slower route. I’m sorry.

  “Daylight is one of life’s greatest gifts,” his mother had told him years ago. “It is easier to accept and believe in daylight.” He wonders now if this is why he has always felt a slight sinking when the sun disappears; even on the happiest of days, there is a sadness and an awareness of the shadows. Sundowning, they call it in hospitals and geriatric units, when confusion and distortion settles in. But he feels he has known some fragment of this for much of his life.

  He was only ten when the train wreck took his father, but the moment divided his life as clearly and sharply as scalpel to flesh; that part of his mother that had radiated the light of day long after it passed was suddenly gone, extinguished, cut away with such exact precision that he spent the next fifty years looking for it, as if it might have been saved and frozen, like the many specimens his father had surgically removed and sent to pathology for study. It was only in the aftermath of her death that it hit him; all those hopes of a return had been futile.

  As a boy, Frank was fascinated by his father’s knowledge and skill, the way he could talk about the human body as if it were a machine, the way he could thread a needle and mend something better than Frank’s mother or grandmother, and the way that nothing seemed to scare or bother him, no amount of blood or trauma. People often stopped them in public to say thank you, lifting sleeves and pant legs, tugging shirt collars off to the side to show the excellent remnants of his work, from the faintest white lines to those resembling a zipper or track. His father didn’t look like a hero; in fact, he was the opposite—average height and build, dark hair, and an expression that always seemed studious, as if he were on the verge of figuring it all out. But he had an air of confidence about him that made others trust him, and apparently he had more than lived up to it all in the operating room.

  Frank did not inherit his father’s gift or desire to be a surgeon, and in fact was teased in high school biology for getting light-headed when formaldehyde frogs were splayed out in front of him on a lab table. He was much more in sync with his father’s father, a general practitioner of that earlier generation, when so much was diagnosed by clues—the eyes, the by-products, the gums, the reflexes. His grandfather always said that what he did was not unlike someone unraveling a mystery, and he taught Frank to put all the pieces together like a puzzle, like the blind men trying to describe an elephant and each bringing forward a different part. “The real value is when you can put it all in context,” his grandfather had said many times, and he might’ve said those words when they learned Frank’s father had died, but of course that was impossible, since his grandfather had died the year before.

  The real value is when you can put it all in context, son. Decipher it, solve the riddle. Memory had taken two fragments of Frank’s life—both true—and lined them up to provide a story. He thinks about it all a lot these days, the different parts of life, what he and Lil have jokingly called the long limp to home plate, something not as funny as it used to be. Both his father and grandfather had died way too young—his grandfather in his early sixties, and his father barely forty. Out at third. Out at second. Often, it had been easier to think of them that way, briefly out, but still in the dugout, just waiting for another inning.

  Frank’s grandfather was thin and always impeccably dressed—suspenders and bow tie and long sleeves on even the hottest of days, a wry, bemused smile that always suggested t
here was more to learn and understand. In 1973, when a physician with the last name Frank made the discovery of what is known as “Frank’s sign”—a crease in the earlobe that might suggest cardiovascular disease or diabetes—Frank felt closer than ever to those childhood exchanges, as if he could hear his grandfather calling out to him from the grave: Think, Frank. Look, Frank. Your job is to find the clues and put them together. Frank was nearing retirement before it occurred to him that his grandfather’s words had likely been what led him to an interest in history and archeology in the first place; so much of life was such a mystery that it was satisfying to hold a solid object for study and enlightenment, classification. How often had he stood in front of a class and held up a skull or a leg bone and asked the students to imagine the body that once housed it. Did it have scales? Feathers? Fur?

  His grandfather had said, “Our job is to find the pieces and put them together, each generation getting closer to the whole.” And now Frank’s own earlobes bear those heavy creases, but who needs the extra proof when all else is so clear. “Just say it,” Frank said at his last appointment. “I’m a walking time bomb.” But the young man, barely out of school, refused to do so, just continued in that calm, steady voice talking about heart-healthy diets and surgical options, how these options don’t come with guarantees, and how there are all kinds of risks anesthetizing a brain as old as his, if they would be even willing to try it, as if Frank had never heard any of it before.

  Our job is to find the pieces and put them together, and, yes, Frank has always found solace in that, as well as in studying something contained by time or geography or both, contained in a way that you could imagine someday knowing all that can possibly be known. Here are the remains of a man who was born here and died there at approximately age nineteen in 1322 BC. It would drive him crazy to be in a field constantly growing and changing, to be in a lab racing for the cure, or programming computers, where the language you learned last year is dead and everything is different, like when Lil was not able to help the kids with their sixth-grade math. How frustrating to try and put together a puzzle that is constantly changing shape and size and color. No, it has been much more satisfying for him to focus, to explore the objects discovered in a particular site at a particular time. Find the pieces and put them together. His grandfather ended many of his case discussions this way: the symptoms, the diagnosis, the treatment. For Frank, it was the discovery, the dating and cataloging, the preservation.

  “My job is to stitch up or get rid of whatever your grandfather finds that shouldn’t be there,” Frank’s father once joked. “I’m the cleanup man.” His father resembled his grandfather—the posture, the timbre of their voices—and Frank now has trouble distinguishing the physical features of one from the other, an overlapping blurred symbol of strength and knowledge. But images of his mother remain vivid—too vivid—the before and the after; the happy wife of an exemplary surgeon living in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the wife of a slow-moving tobacco farmer in rural eastern North Carolina.

  A few months ago, he had told Lil he had an appointment at Duke, yet another checkup, and that, no, he didn’t need for her to make the drive with him, she should enjoy the day, keep doing whatever it was she was doing in there surrounded by her boxes and papers, the radio tuned to classical. She said she didn’t have that appointment written down. “And I always write everything down,” she said. And then he lied and said he was sure he had told her. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. He had to look away when he saw her expression, the flush of her cheeks and the look of confusion and then irritation. He felt guilty, an old ugly pang of guilt. He had never been able to lie to her, not well anyway.

  “Maybe I forgot to tell you,” he said, finding a reason to turn to the window as if he had just heard something. “All routine—pee in a cup, stand on my head, recite the Pledge of Allegiance.”

  “That one might give you trouble.”

  They both laughed, but he felt the heavy weight of her studying him.

  Now, he moves quickly to the front door and out into the bright morning. The humidity is already like a wet, heavy blanket as he goes to his car and slips behind the wheel. They had laughed about living on a golf course when neither had ever played. They heard someone yell, “Fore,” and they called back, “Against.” They tried not to complain about the humidity and ugly, scraggly pine trees, especially when Becca and some of her friends were there and working so hard to help them settle in. But they have both missed the New England weather and their home in Newton.

  And, no, he hadn’t missed the shoveling—not really, given all the warnings that had begun to come with it—or climbing the slick, icy steps, but they loved their house and it was hard to think about what the young couple who bought it have done—ripping out walls and the century-old radiators, blowing out the back and filling it with glass, like a huge aquarium, digging up the old hedge of lilacs to make room for a pool. Lil couldn’t stop talking about it—over and over—after their old neighbor Gloria had called to report, which, for better or worse, she had done for fifty years. A hip replacement a year ago gave Gloria more time than ever before, and Lil finally had to say that it was getting hard for her to hear these things, she wasn’t sleeping at night. The lilacs were difficult enough, but then her perennial beds, years of collecting and adding and tending, were plowed out for an outdoor kitchen and a big firepit.

  “An outdoor kitchen?” Lil had asked, and reached for him to take her hand. “Why would you have an outdoor kitchen?”

  When they had first met Gloria, Lil had despised her, a feeling that lasted for a couple of years; she called her Mrs. Kravitz, after the nosy neighbor on Bewitched, and did a whole little routine where she imitated her, slouched shoulders and frowning grimace as if she had just swigged vinegar: “Was Becca supposed to be with that Collins boy? Do you know he smokes? Did you know your son sometimes sneaks out his bedroom window? He’s going to kill himself one of these days on the ice.” They learned a lot from Gloria, whether they wanted to or not, and unfortunately the education continued after their migration south; every time Gloria called with a new installment, Lil hung up vowing to never answer again, and yet she was unable to resist the next time not to help herself to another round of painful news. “She’s the only person I know who remembers what our house looked like when we first bought it,” Lil said one day, “and the kids grew up together.” And then, the recall of those memories softened even the worst effects of Gloria. “And Gloria’s husband died so young,” she continued, as if to convince Frank why she maintained a relationship with someone who tested her last nerve.

  He looks back at the house, the front door painted the same shade of blue as their old one in Massachusetts. Benjamin Moore, Spectra Blue. A different name but the same formula, and no telling how many gallons he has purchased over the years, because it was often her choice for the background of sky in the many dance recitals that came each spring.

  “Doors are very important to me,” Lil had said when they were moving into their very first house, her hair dark and pulled up into a knot, an old paint-speckled shirt of his hanging from her shoulders as she stood and studied the door, a paintbrush in one hand and a cigarette in the other. They were barely thirty.

  He brakes for two golf carts and six men dressed like Easter eggs—Tweedledees and Tweedledums—who wave broadly before disappearing over a rolling green hill. The canopy of tall, spindly pines shades his drive to the main road, the pines and humid air and blazing sun also a part of his long-ago childhood, which he spent years rejecting and trying to forget. But now he feels pulled back like never before. He needs to go back to where his father died and then where he last saw his mother. Maybe today, he will walk through that house and stand out in the yard where he played as a boy. It’s where he first felt the dark waves of fear and loneliness he has run from ever since.

  Shelley

  Shelley always has a to-do list much longer than she can ever finish, and she keeps it with her
at all times, checking things off and then making a clean copy, putting down new things to fill the old, like those things she thinks about but never gets around to doing, like scrubbing the bathroom grout with a toothbrush dipped in Clorox or sorting that big plastic bin of Legos into colors. Those are the kinds of things she would love to do, but of course who has time? It’s about all she can do to get Harvey up and dressed and moving, and then get herself to work on time.

  She pulls into the parking lot of the courthouse with no idea of what to do next. Should she walk right up those granite steps and through the big doors like nothing had happened, avoiding eye contact as she always does with those lined up and waiting for some kind of sentence or judgment? Usually she feels proud that she is not among them, their eyes bloodshot and cigarettes dwindled to ash, some crime or misdemeanor heaped on their shoulders. She is sympathetic, but she is also afraid of them. She is afraid she will be told that that’s where she belongs, there in the lineup of those trying to climb from a hole.

  Sometimes, when she doesn’t want to be home alone, Shelley comes and parks and just watches people coming and going. The Food Lion is always good, and so is the cemetery, near where she lives, and so is the courthouse. So many people and for so many different reasons: marriage licenses and restraining orders, murder trials and traffic violations. She has to keep the car running so she can stay cool in the AC, which she knows burns gas, but there’s no other choice. If the wait gets to be too long, she will go across the street and wander around Food Lion and the Dollar Store, where it’s cool, and if anyone ever makes eye contact, like they want to come over to her window, she studies her phone or the newspaper she always keeps in the car for this reason.

  Recently, she learned about Google Maps and has been looking up places, like where she lived with Brent or where she lives now, and it’s eerie to see the house there, as if she or Harvey might come out the door or peep from a window. She had looked up the name of that old man who keeps coming to the door: Frank Wishart. And now she types in his address—524 Ivy Trail—and studies the house, a neat little house like a storybook cottage with a blue front door. She zooms out and can see the golf course. Why would he ever want to come back to the house where she lives? Whitepages.com lists his family members: Lillian Wishart, Rebecca Wishart. She makes a note on the dashboard, where she has penned a lot of other information, like the phone number of Harvey’s school or how many calories are in Chicken McNuggets or when her next oil change is due. Maybe she should ride over to their house and ask to come in. Maybe she should ask do they want to swap houses like on that TV show?