Carter Clay (21 page)

“Hey!” Carter Clay holds up the comic book. “You want to come out and I'll read you this?”

The noise Katherine Milhause makes is not a noise of assent. It is neutral as the creak of a branch, which sound it resembles. Still, her expression is her own and particular, and Jersey recognizes it—though not from a time before the accident, no; this is an expression of the new Katherine.

The story Carter reads to Katherine Milhause tells of a brother and sister who fall into bad ways after being raised without religious instruction. It is impossible for Carter to say if Katherine listens. She lies back on her bed and closes her eyes, sips at her soft drink, strokes and rolls one of her fuzz balls, and eventually—Carter
has started a second story by then—drops off to sleep.

The girl—Jersey—thanks Carter after she has followed him out into the hall. She gestures apologetically toward his street clothes. “I guess you were on your way home?”

“I'm glad I was here,” he says. Which is true, but now he wishes he could flee. He feels nervous in the girl's company since they do not have Katherine to focus upon. “I'm—glad your family's coming to the church.”

The girl responds in a voice so low that Carter must ask her to repeat herself.

“I was saying—well, maybe you know.” She stares out the patched screen of the hallway's track window. “My family was in an accident, here. Really, we live in Arizona. And we're not Christians, really. My grandma—she makes me go to church.”

“Well, that's good, though, Jersey. 'Cause you can learn about the forgiveness of sins and—oh, eternal life and all.”

The girl shakes her head.

“What?”

“If your God exists, there's probably plenty of things I'll go to hell for. I mean, if somebody told me that I could kill the person who killed my dad—if I could kill him, or her, even by just
thinking
, I'd do it.”

Carter crouches down beside the girl, who looks away and begins to pick at the folded-over edges of the screen's patch. “I guess I understand that,” he says, and then, his heavy heart carrying him further than he intends, he adds, “but maybe someday you'll forgive him. Maybe you'll get better, both you and your mom. I pray for both of you, and—Pastor Bitner says it's okay to pray for
anything
at all—as long as it's not evil, I mean—since God's only going to give us what's in his plan.”

“So—if God's only giving us what's in his plan, what difference does your praying make?”

Carter rises shakily to his feet, dusts off the knees of his pants. “I'm kind of new at this, Jersey, but—well, you can get to know God better through prayer. And you can pray to live according to what He wants for you.”

She pushes the window forward on its tracks, then pulls it back. “But if your God wants me to live a certain way,” she says, “why doesn't he just
have
me act that way?”

A noisy milk truck passes by, bringing supplies to the home, momentarily casting the pair in shadow and roar, and it is when the truck moves on—as if it were a curtain pulled aside—that Carter sees R.E. panhandling in the next parking lot, not fifty feet away.

Should he go out to R.E.
?

But suppose that R.E. hates Carter for slugging him and then ditching him after the accident? And what if R.E. feels that he should let the girl know the truth about who crashed into her and her family?

“Is that what you're saying?” the girl asks. Her voice is higher. She is upset. “That God wanted some creep to drive into my family?” She blinks back furious tears, and he tries to think of what to say to comfort her, and also of what he might say to R.E.

“It's because of that free will business, Jersey. He wants us to have free will.”

“Free will, but everything's planned?”

“You know, though”—Carter sneaks another look out the window. Discovers that R.E. has disappeared from view—“I guess—” He means to start for the door to the parking lot, but when he turns, he finds that the girl now has lifted her weight off the wheelchair's seat, and that she holds herself in the air, suspended by her arms.

Her breath squeezed with effort, she tells him, “Go on with what you were saying.”

He shakes his head. He holds his breath until she finally lowers herself into the seat; and even then he is quiet while she uses her hands to reposition her legs, her feet. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I was staring, wasn't I?”

She does not answer, but he can tell she wants to get away from him even before she says good-bye, and, quick, he pulls the copy of
Josannah!
from his back pocket. “Here,” he says, “take this. It says things better than me.”

“Thanks,” she says, but Carter can tell she is not truly grateful, and for a moment he feels a little angry. It seems unfair that she does not feel bound to him as he feels bound to her.

“But wait,” she says, then reaches into the bag hanging off the side of her chair, and pulls out a book and hands it to him. “I appreciate you being nice to my mom, and—she wrote this before she got hurt. If you'd like to see.”

It is a relief to Jersey to get away from Fair Oaks. Even the busy street in front of the nursing home feels relaxing after her scene with her mother and that intense—and odd—conversation with Carter Clay.

While she waits for the crosswalk light to change, she glances at the cover illustration of the
Josannah!
in her lap: an international jumble of fireman, nurse, grandma, grandpa, telephone repairman, lady in a kimono, homemaker, factory worker, turbanned gentleman, chef—all of whom march together into a heaven that looks very much like the drawings of national park-lands that appeared in those booklets Jersey and her classmates always received during Fire Prevention Week.

Never debate the issues with an idiot.
So her father always said. As if you always had a choice. As if being smart were always an advantage.

In the past, at school, Jersey was sometimes ridiculed for being smart, but now she needs to be much smarter than ever before. When she and her mother get back to Arizona, she means to hire tutors from the university to come work with her. To make her so smart that by the time she gets to college, no one will imagine that she is weak or pathetic just because she uses a wheelchair.

Spinning across campus. That's how she sees herself. Always moving fast. A silvery blur of competence.

M.B.'s rule: no wine before 8
P.M
. Tonight, however, she has broken the rule because, she reasoned, she woke up an hour and a half early this morning, and that meant that 6:30 felt like 8, and besides, it was a bad day.

Red nine goes on black ten. Black three on red four, and there's an ace of clubs!

At M.B.'s “Ah-hah!” Jersey looks up, teary-eyed, from her reading in one of M.B.'s ladies' magazines—some irritatingly heartwarming article about a woman who adopted thirteen handicapped and biracial children. Jersey knows—having spied the inky lining of her grandmother's lips—that M.B. started drinking early tonight, and so Jersey feels particularly abandoned, nervous. She has no intention whatsoever of telling M.B. about this afternoon's scene at Fair Oaks, and she hopes no one from Fair Oaks will mention it either.

Please.

Are such hopes a little like a prayer? Once, Jersey saw a photo of a Tibetan prayer wheel, a prayer-inscribed brass drum that revolved in the churning force of a white and navy river. The photo was on a wall calendar that hung in the kitchen of her friend Erin Acuff. According to the calendar's caption, the prayer wheel's believers counted on the force of the river to send up their prayers in the same way that it milled their grain—not
merely to save time but to multiply what was humanly possible. Such shifting of spiritual work to river-power struck Jersey as somehow wrong, or lazy, but when she said so, Erin's mother laughed and said, “What a little Puritan you are, Jersey!”

A Puritan. At the time, Jersey was pleased to have grabbed Via Acuff's slightly flaky attention, but could not decide whether to take the remark as insult or compliment (though Via, Jersey understood, meant it as a goad, a suggestion that Jersey needed a new attitude).

A Puritan.

These days, it seems possible to Jersey that she has inscribed her very own
brain
with pleas on behalf of her mother, herself; perhaps, even while she sleeps, her faithful blood courses over her pleas like the river that does the work of turning the wheel.

“Hey!” Hearing the girl sigh deep and long, M.B. looks up from her cards. “For crying out loud, kid! Cheer up!”

Sober up.
This is what Jersey would like to say to M.B. Instead, however, she says what is more important: “We've got to get Mom out of there.”

M.B. makes a sour face. “What's this?”

“We've got to get Mom out of Fair Oaks.”

M.B. picks up her mug. She eyes the girl over its rim as she takes a discreet sip. “Look at it this way, kid: we get her
out
of there, I'll end up
in
there, and then where will you be?”

Jersey meets her grandmother's gaze. There is a pain in her chest, as if M.B. has just driven a flag into her heart and declared her conquered land. To take a breath, to retaliate, is essential, but, nonetheless, it hurts the girl to say, “Well, I suppose you could try to send me back to St. Mary's.”

M.B. sets down the mug and inspects the top card of the next trio from her deck as if it absorbs her completely, but Jersey hurries on, “I heard you that day they made you bring me home, M.B. When you asked Mrs. Carlyle if they couldn't keep me on like a boarder. I
heard
you.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” M.B. says, then turns and begins poking around behind herself in the cracks of the leather recliner. “Where is that darned lighter?”

“I wouldn't be surprised if you tried putting me in Fair Oaks, too! Why should you deal with me if Fair Oaks can do it?”

M.B. blinks at the girl. “I don't—why, when you were in the hospital, I prayed to God to take me instead of you and your mother!”

“Really?” The girl looks back at the book in her lap as if the conversation with M.B. has gone on long enough; she is finished, but then she adds—the lid she has placed on her emotions rendering her voice almost sensuous—“Maybe you should be more careful what you pray for, then, M.B. Maybe it's your fault we're alive.”

Only when she can hear M.B.'s knock rattle the storm door of Patsy Glickman's unit—only then does Jersey begin to cry. “Bitch. Lousy, crummy bitch.” She wheels herself over to the footstool and whisks M.B.'s unfinished game of cards onto the floor. A petty gesture, she knows, and it only makes her feel worse. She sits back in her chair. Stares at the cards on the floor. Lifts M.B.'s coffee mug from the little side table. She has tasted wine but only tiny sips from her parents' glasses of special-occasion champagne. For M.B.'s dark potion, she holds her nose and downs the stuff in one great gulp.

Arrh! She shivers. Arrh! But that does not stop her from heading toward the kitchen, and the cupboard under the sink, which she long ago realized held M.B.'s stash.

The glimmer of glass at the back looks promising, but it is not easy for her to reach such a distance. First she must fetch a spatula from the utensil drawer and draw forward the boxes of dishwasher detergent and Spic and Span. By the time she switches over to the long-handled broom for the actual retrieval of the bottle at the back, she is in a sweat, but the broom does finish the job. With a sturdy clink, the bottle falls forward. Then it is within reach of the spatula, and the wine from the mug has begun to take effect, and she just has to
laugh
in delight.

“A toast!” she says, and ferries the bottle to the mug in the living room.

How interesting her face feels. How interesting. And her lips, too. In five gulps, she downs the contents of the second mug.

“Oh, me, oh, my, Erin, I'm drunk out of my mind!” This is what she means to cry out when Erin Acuff answers the telephone in Seca, where it is still early—Jersey knows exactly how Seca looks, the rosy ring of mountain sunset, the Acuffs eating dinner on their patio, tiny bats zooming down to the swimming pool for drinks and bugs. Surely Jersey's wild call will drive out any idea Erin might have of Jersey as crippled girl and replace it with something entirely new, and interesting—

But the Acuffs are not at home. The Acuffs have installed an answering machine, and over the opening of U-2's “With or Without You,” Erin's big brother says, “Leave a message, dude.”

Jersey hangs up and, immediately, with a huff of breath meant to stop any slopping over into untoward emotions, she punches in her own number in Seca. Counts the rings. In a way, she is there, isn't she? Holding onto the telephone, she is, at the very least, connected to the ringing telephones in the Seca kitchen and in her parents' study and in the front hall. And who is to say, then, that she cannot send herself through the telephone and right into her own bedroom—there's the
Archaeopteryx
mural, and her own of the twin beds into which she can surely climb, yes?

Eventually, this notion depletes itself—
there
is not
here
, after all—and she hangs up. She feels lonely. When will M.B. come back? She pours and drinks another splash of wine, then moves into the middle of M.B.'s living room. Pops a powerful but inept wheelie. Comes down hard and laughing. “Chugga, chugga, choo, choo!”

Can they hear her next door?

Up
on the chair's big wheels! And this time she
holds
the position, the way they taught her at St. Mary's, balancing, balancing, she is a tightrope artist, an aerial queen, she has never, ever held a wheelie this long, yes, the wine has bestowed amazing grace.

“A-ma-zing grace,” she sings, sweating a little. But then she tips her head back too far, and gravity asserts itself, sends girl and
chair slamming backward into the floor, breath knocked high as the ceiling.

She cannot cry, only moan around the loaf of pain in her chest, and then laugh at the idea of M.B. coming through the door just now. To the empty unit, she calls, “I'm drunk!” She spreads her arms on the floor. She has never been down here before, and the baby blue carpet feels nice against her palms, like the gentle prickle of the fur on a teddy bear.

“DRUNK!”

Dragging herself out of a wheelchair that has tipped over is not a maneuver Jersey learned at St. Mary's, but in time, she does manage to free herself, right the chair, and haul herself up into the thing once more.

The hisses and pops on Patsy Glickman's thirty-year-old recording of Tony Bennett singing “I Wanna Be Around” are sounds of wear and tear that Patsy associates with the crooner's own aging, and so she loves and laments the intrusions in much the same way that she loved and lamented the late Milt Glickman's sags and wrinkles; they showed he was still alive, yes, but also predicted his demise.

Patsy would not think of replacing her Tony Bennett record with a new copy. Even the songs she did not care for so much in the early years have become friends she would now miss. She did replace her hi-fi when it could no longer be repaired, but in her own move to Florida, she remained faithful to most of her New Jersey furnishings (the
mamasan
and
papasan
chairs she and Milt bought on their trip to Hawaii, the French provincial dining room set, the rattan of the master suite).

M.B. thinks Patsy's furnishings show a lack of good taste. Worst of all are the orange table lamps that almost scrape the living room ceiling, and feature bases designed to look like candle-holders upon which great quantities of wax have dripped. While Patsy talks on about a book she recently read (farmwife has an affair with a sexy photographer), M.B. imagines herself telling a sympathetic friend, “Her lamps look like something out of
Mickey
and the Beanstalk
! Every time I'm there, I imagine Mickey peeking out from behind them, watching for the Giant!”

Actually, now that Lorne is dead, Jersey is the only person to whom M.B. could say such a thing, and M.B. does not want to think about Jersey, though it is hard
not
to think about the girl, given the thump of rock and roll from #335—

“Let me tell you,” Patsy says, “that book made my heart go pitty-pat!”

While Patsy grins and fans the air in front of herself, M.B. rolls her eyes. Patsy laughs as if M.B. does not mean her exasperation, but M.B.
does
mean it. M.B. considers Patsy and her romantic notions hopelessly silly. As if Patsy were not forty pounds overweight with a perm that appears to have been modeled after the coat of her ancient poodle.

(“Let's go be volunteers for the blood drive!” Patsy will say. “What do you bet there's some widowers there?” Or: “There's going to be a talk on bonsai trees.
A talk on Indianjewelry, mangrove conservation, what to do in the event of a hurricane.”
“How about
Barefoot in the Park
, M.B.? That's a cute one! And we'd probably find some lonely hearts out in the lobby during intermission!”)

“You wouldn't believe the fight Jersey and me had tonight!” This is what M.B. longs to say to Patsy. But as she cannot tell Patsy what the girl overheard at St. Mary's, the tale of the evening's quarrel is impossible. Patsy would never understand M.B.'s hoping that St. Mary's would let the girl stay as a boarder. Patsy adores her own grandchildren. Of course, Patsy's grandchildren have normal kid interests
and
do not live with her and require a wheelchair and need help taking a bath—

The poodle hops down from her spot in Patsy's lap to sniff at M.B.'s feet. “No, you,” M.B. says, and then, “I was reading today about these free radical things—”

“Free radicals?”

“It's like—oxygen, you know? We've got to have oxygen, but some of it's poison too. It makes our cells rust.”

“Princess, no!” Patsy scolds, as the poodle drags her wet ribbon of tongue across M.B.'s instep. “Just take off your shoes, M.B., and tuck your feet up so she can't get at them.”

M.B. does as she is told, but the dog stays, little mop of coat aquiver as she inserts her nose into the now empty shoes.

“Princess.” Patsy slips off her own shoes—gold sandals, studded with fat, fake jewels—and extends her feet. The dog immediately stops sniffing M.B.'s flats, and trots over to Patsy. Ick, thinks M.B., as the dog licks Patsy's toes, but she also feels somewhat abandoned.