Arcadia (32 page)

That’s it? he says. I thought you were going to say that Hannah’s disease is progressing faster than expected.

She peers at him sideways, her mouth twisted.

Oh, he says.

I can manage to come up a couple times a week, if you want, she says. I love it out here.

We’d be thrilled to see you as often as you can make it, he says.

She turns her head to look at him. He is acutely aware of the fact of her, solid and real, her gentle gravity, her breath on his cheeks. I would like to see you too, she says, then shyly looks away.

In a small clearing where the Sheep’s Meadow used to sprawl, Hannah is on a blanket, eating Glory’s applesauce. Bit takes a photo and she preens. It is a new compulsion of his to snatch Hannah’s face with the camera whenever she’s not looking. Words have thickened past the point of clarity in her mouth, but he thinks she says, Surely, you’ve shot lovelier cover models.

Never, he says. You’re by far the loveliest. She beams as well as she can, posing.

Soon she is tired; she wants to go home. She struggles and waves him back. A slow one-armed push up onto her knees, a wobbly stand. Hannah stretches as he packs up their lunch. She takes one step onto the path, and he raises the camera to his face. Then she falls out of the frame, and he looks into the world to find her crumpled on the ground.

Hannah, he says.

I know, she says. I know. He half-carries her home.

Grete comes in, wearing her track sweatshirt, smelling of perspiration. She sees her grandmother in Abe’s old wheelchair and says nothing. But in the night, Grete and Luisa conspire. And when dawn brightens the window, it lights up the wheelchair, where a pillow sits, repurposed from one of Abe’s ancient cashmere sweaters; the wheels sparkle with glitter nail polish; there are pom-poms on the handles. A queen of hearts is lodged in a wheel, and it whirs when Hannah moves. So you can’t sneak up on us, says Grete. Hannah gives a wheel a spin with the knuckle of her better hand; she laughs until she cries and cries until she laughs again.

These days, the house is oddly full of Hannah’s laughter. She laughs about everything: the way she can no longer speak, a funny story on the radio, when Grete in her eagerness trips on her own shoes; when she and Grete drink cocoa from the beautiful bone china cups of her grandmother and Hannah’s hand goes rogue and shatters one.

Are you happier now? Bit says, alarmed by this excessive laughter.

No, she garbles, I’m petrified! And this, too, cracks her up.

The track is recycled tires, and when the wind rises and blows across it, Bit smells highway, the American longing to go. All he wants to do is stay. In this place, in this bright day, the children flitting in their uniforms like vivid butterflies, Hannah’s jerking smile. He tucks the blanket around her legs, more in protest against the wheelchair than against any chill. It is a miracle they are even here at the track meet: at the eleventh hour, the school superintendent saw how distant SARI was from them and grudgingly gave permission.

Hannah’s neck is weak today, and she rests her head upon Bit’s palm. Her skull is heavy and overly warm. I’m happy to be here, she says thickly.

He watches the boys, the brutes hurling shotputs like marbles. A girl spins a discus, and the meat of her arm ripples as she throws. The children go blazing by, and their parents dance and shriek. How it would feel, Bit thinks, to be young again, to lift through the air on a pole, to fly over the sand and land in a great explosion. He loves the good sediment of time, wouldn’t trade anything to have to go through that adolescent pain all over again. But, for a moment, he longs to be one of these runners, these leapers, these fliers; to be one of the lovers standing there, that boy holding the willowy girl, so easily able to forget the world because a pretty young person longs to press close to him.

It is time for the one-mile. Grete sends a nervous smile their way, her black wisps blowing under the folded green bandanna. Bit can hardly bear to watch the runners assemble on the line. The gun pops. There’s a blur of sharp elbows. Within a hundred yards, the pack thins out. The slenderest pull away, Grete’s legs longer than the two in front of her, turning over more slowly. The runners pass for the first time in a patter that Bit can feel inside himself. They dissolve behind the high jump; they reemerge. The second girl falters, falls behind. Now the race is between Grete and the leader. The track goes quiet. People watch the two in front spin by again, dragging the slower girls like a lengthening train.

Come on, Grete, Bit groans, but Hannah says something that sounds like, Smart. Waiting.

Around again. When they pass, there is a sheen of sweat on the face of the lead girl; Grete is dry and watchful.

Voices begin to build. Around the last curve, one hundred meters left to go. On the straightaway, Grete moves even with the leader, easy, and her legs seem to blur. Side by side, the girls bear down into the sprint, and everyone is screaming. Bit himself is urging Grete forward with his voice, hopping up and down, frenzied, washed with a strange relief in this senseless shouting. The girls chest forward over the last ten meters, strong as horses. They tick down to a walk, nearly falling on their wobbly legs. It is impossible for Bit to say who won.

Now they wait, Grete in a swarm of petting hands, as the other girls trickle in. An official puffs over and confers with the coaches, then turns to the two leaders. He murmurs something.

Grete screams, Fuck! and throws her bandanna and stomps away.

Bit has to wait for the downswoop of his heart to steady. Apparently, he says, my daughter is a poor loser.

But Hannah’s face reflects back the sun. Got my devil in her, she says.

Bit leans closer. You were a poor sport? he says, knowing it’s true, even as he says it.

No. Fast, says Hannah. Together, they watch Grete composing herself at the fence. Fast, fast, fast, Hannah says, and she pats her wasted legs with her good hand, as if to praise them for everything they had once so easily done.

Bit is in the dawn in the forest, breathing the scent of water, all fish and sweet leaf rot, when the sun grows through the treetops and touches him where he stands, camera forgotten. He is so still the doe doesn’t see him and bends her elegant head to drink at the stream. There is a flash of red: a fox, startled, running fast and looking backward; it careens into the doe’s haunch and bounces back on its rear. The creatures gaze at one another, appalled. Bit guffaws, and the animals disappear in a blur. Alone now, Bit can’t catch his breath, and he laughs so hard that he goes dizzy. Something breaks in him, and the breaking, at last, feels good.

Grete has one friend. Her name is Yoko, and she has a sweet cupcake face, a trill of a laugh. She is a Japanese exchange student in this wee country place; now that Grete has come to school, Yoko is always at the house. She was supposed to go home but can’t: Japan is under quarantine, ten thousand dead already, the photographs of the streets swept of people, and those who can afford it wearing oxygen tanks. Yoko’s host parents in Summerton are dim, strict Christians who make her play the organ for hymn hour at night while they sing. When they pick her up at the Green house, they honk impatiently and never come in. Behind Grete’s door, there are sobs and Grete’s gentle soothing. When they emerge, both puffy-faced, Grete and Yoko bake cookies, watch movies, build panoramas of classic short stories for English class. A man and a woman at a little table; the hills in the distance, white elephants. A heart below the floorboards, and curled within it, the text of the story on a strip of paper that scrolls out; a tale-tell heart. A brain like a phrenological illustration, a bullet passing through it, the sections each filled with a tiny image of bliss.

Bit studies the last project for hours. During his white nights, he holds the shoebox in his hands and looks at the delicate drawings of happiness in the lobes. If he holds it long enough, his own scenes swim up. The long stretch of Helle under a white sheet, Cole’s adolescent face the first time he heard
Houses of the Holy,
a sea urchin in a tidepool on a trip Grete and he took to the shore, spiny as a horse chestnut on her fat pink palm.

Hannah can’t be understood. She must take Grete’s e-reader and pluck out the words with her two fingers that work. She barks with frustration; she weeps over nothing. At supper, which Bit cooks—peas and grilled tofu, soy cheese enchiladas, the old Arcadia standards he has been cooking for thirty years now—the conversation between Yoko and Hannah is a surreal play.

Hannah: Gwabway eel o aampee en ooah eewa, Oko.

Yoko: Sofunneee, Glannah! Ha-ha-ha!

They fall into stitches, and Grete and Bit look on, bewildered. They share a glance, shut out of the delight in the air; for a breath, envious of the inarticulate.

In the full blow of April, Arcadia seems even emptier of people. The strong wind rises against the trees so they bend like girls washing their hair; it rattles the Arcadia House windows. Wandering through the upstairs rooms one day, Bit finds a raccoon in Leif’s vast bathtub, spinning a bar of soap around and around in its humanoid hands.

If he listens closely, over the wind against the screens and a distant plane above, he can almost hear the Arcadia he knew, the strum of Handy’s guitar somewhere in the thickness of the house, the women in the Eatery kitchen, laughing as they cook. His own young voice, urgent and high. Although he almost hurts his ears, straining, he can’t understand what the once-upon-a-time Bit is saying to the current version of himself or to the one who will stand here in the future, a man changed as the house is changed, worn a little more by time and loss, gradually dragged down by gravity. If he is so lucky. If they are all so lucky. The schools on the West Coast have been closed; the airports are bare. Dogs trot down the middle of L.A.’s freeways. In Summerton, the mail carriers wear gloves and masks, and in all the stores, there are great tippy stacks of wind-up radios and soup and bottled water. But in Arcadia, with their well and garden and basement full of food, they are an island. They could wait as the disease washed again and again over the world and emerge when it was safe again.

What relief there would be in starting anew; what hope there would be in doing better. The old story, Noah’s, the first step into the world scrubbed clean.

The raccoon is watching him, holding out his uncanny black hand, the sliver of soap catching the light from the window. Bit reaches slowly and takes it. Though the creature surrenders the soap, it curls its black lips and reveals its teeth, and Bit can’t tell whether it is smiling or showing its fear.

Ellis steps through the ferns and onto the rock beside Bit. A Saturday and Grete is Hannah-sitting. After the examination—Hannah losing function and weight in shocking numbers—Ellis looked scared. In the hallway Bit said: Tell me on our hike.

A date? Perhaps. They had arranged it on her last visit. He wanted to show her the waterfall, the spring-fat waters coming down, a white sheet fading into the wind. But they are here and it is only a strip of ribbon. He looks at the ghost of the waterfall and feels ill.

It’s beautiful, Ellis says.

No it’s not, Bit snaps at her. She frowns back at him, and he says, Sorry. It’s just less than it should be. When I was a kid, it
roared
. We could hear it a mile away. He laughs in embarrassment at his swoop of sadness and says, Everyone in my house seems to have inappropriate emotional reactions these days.

Ellis presses his arm. Understandable. Grete’s fourteen. You’re bearing the weight of your mother’s sickness. And Hannah’s bulbar paralysis is causing her to react wildly.

Oh, says Bit. I just thought my mother was happier.

Ellis sits and pulls out the sandwiches she’d brought. Chicken or egg, she says.

I’m so sorry, Bit says, dismayed. I’ve been vegan my whole life.

Ellis gives a beautiful guffaw that echoes against the cliff. I meant, she says, who knows what came first. Hannah truly could be happier. She has her two loves near her; she’s on massive antidepressants. It’s spring, and you make sure she sits in the sun for hours every day. And maybe all that crazy laughter in itself is making her happier, sparking some kind of neural pathway in her brain. Whatever the case, treat it as a gift.

A gift, Bit says, sitting. A gift would be lunch. What are the sandwiches?

Peanut butter and jelly, she says. I can’t cook.

My favorite, he says and cuts an apple for them to share.

Ellis stretches her bare feet into the little pool. She smiles at him, chewing. Listen, she says. This is probably not what you want to hear. But do know it’ll get worse before it gets better.

Your cooking? Bit says.

Ellis doesn’t smile. Her eyes, in the sun, are the deep blue of dusk. She rests her side against his, and he can feel her waiting for him to either lean in or shift away. I know it will, he says, leaning in.

In the kitchen window, there appears a lady in a bedazzled purple mask. In the kitchen, Hannah says, Shit, and wheels into her room. The lady goes to the back of her car and heaves at something in the trunk. When Bit comes into the bright dust to help, she gives a squeal. Oh, thanks, she calls out. I’m helpless!

She’s one of the Library Ladies; such creatures everywhere have blue marshmallows for hair. Bit carries the box into the house, and she fills a glass with water and drinks it down. In the pink circle where the mask had been, the moist skin of her cheeks has collected dust; the wrinkles fanning from her lips are making their own mud. I’ll just leave it off, she declares. You are hermits out here, no way you got the SARI. Your mom around?

She’s taking a nap, Bit says.

We passed a hat, the lady says, patting at herself with a tissue. All around town. Your mom’s beloved, you know. And we bought her a computer.

Oh, Bit says, at a loss. Gently, he says, But she already has a computer.

The lady says, Not like this one, she doesn’t. Then she cocks her head to the side and says: Are you well? You don’t look well. Are you sleeping? Are you eating? Who’s taking care of you? Do you have a girlfriend? I know a lovely young woman. Pretty hair. What do you call it? Auburn. Are you sure? Take her number. And Bit is left holding a scrap of paper, which he tosses as soon as the lady is gone.