Don't I Know You? (20 page)

The snow dithered away.

“But it did make me wonder, when I found out about the twins.”

“Wonder what?”

I hesitated. Usually I am the listener.

“I wondered if I could have been pregnant with twins too.”

We rode in silence for a while.

“Anyway,” I said, “it was absolutely the right thing to do, for me. And it sounds like this was the right decision for your friend too.”

“Her boyfriend told her that pulling out was better for the environment.”

“Hah. Good one.”

“She's super-serious about the environment.”

“Well, he's right, technically. Unless you factor in the overpopulation it causes.”

Winona's chin trembled.

“She doesn't want me to come over, but I think I'll go see her anyway. Should I?”

“Definitely. Is she going to tell her mother?”

“Probably not. Her mother's sort of a nutcase.”

We looked out the window. Some fine-boned horses, their muscles shining copper in the low sun, grazed in a field.

“
Your original face
,” sang the driver, “
before time and place … before the world was made…”

“So what's up with our driver?” I asked. “He seems to know you all pretty well.”

“He used to be a musician, some sort of jazz person I think. Once he drove us right to our front doors. Another time he took the bus to an Il Fornello in Richmond Hill and we all ordered pizzas. I can't believe he doesn't get fired.”

“Look at where we are, though. It's so incredibly green—it could be Ireland. It keeps on snowing, but the snow just disappears.”

“His name is Van,” Winona said. “Don't worry. It might take a while but he'll get us there.”

*   *   *

I fell asleep for some time. When I woke up, the highway had narrowed to a two-lane road that wound through a landscape of billowing, waist-high grass. Winona and the girls were sleeping too, sprawled against one another, white ear buds in place. I could hear a murmuring leakage of music. For some reason the sun was higher than it had been, although it shone with a diminished intensity. The snow had stopped. Cirrus clouds brindled the blue sky.

Up in the driver's seat, Van raised his arms off the wheel in an exaggerated stretch that ended in a yodel. Honestly, what a show-off.

We were driving on the left side of the road now, and passed a sign that said
DUBLIN
120
MILES.
A cement structure came into view on the horizon. It was low and long, with small windows and a tall, ominous smokestack.

“We'll be making a quick stop here, people,” Van announced. “Feel free to stretch your legs and use the loo.”

The girls woke up and ruffled their hair, smoothed down their skirts. We followed Van out of the bus down a walkway between beds of daffodils and tulips. The day felt both springish and autumnal, with cooler currents threading through the air. Clamorous birdsong came from somewhere, although there were no trees in sight. The air was extraordinarily clear, with a carbonated sparkle, like an alpine meadow on a sunny day.

The building was divided into two wings, “Ambulatory/Long-Term” and “In Transit.” We headed down the “In Transit” one with Van ahead of us, walking fast. He had a shapely little ass, for a guy.

A nurse in a white uniform came toward us. She smiled—a small, complicit, beatific smile, like Meryl Streep in
The Hours
. She didn't speak, but her smile had the most powerful effect on me, as if it were passing right through my body.

I never wanted to leave this place, wherever it was.

At the end of the corridor Van turned into a room, where the air felt cold, almost refrigerated. The rest of us stood shyly in the doorway. We could see a woman propped up in a hospital bed with her long dark hair spread on the pillow. She looked young, pale, and very sad.

“Hey Julie,” Van said. “Sorry I took so long. The bastards keep changing the routes on me.” He took her hand between both of his big ones and chafed it.

“How're you doin', angel?”

Julie gave him a look, half-annoyed, half-grateful. Then she coughed a terrible cough, liquid, harsh, and deep. Van let go of her hand and went over to the window. He wrestled with the sash and lifted it a couple inches.

“Open up the window, I need some air,” said Van, making funny little pig-snorts. Julie didn't laugh. Van pulled a chair up close to her head. She turned away from him.

Some of the girls had drifted into the room. They were the same age as the girl in the bed, no more than sixteen. I couldn't figure out Julie's relationship with Van. Daughter? Niece? Underage ex-lover?

The peace and sparkle of the gardens had vanished in this chilly room and I found myself longing to go, to get back on the bus. Van looked uneasy too. He took a vase of wilted tulips to a little sink in the corner, poured the brackish water down the drain, and refilled it. But most of the petals had dropped. Only dusty black stamens remained.

I went over to the other side of Julie's bed and she gave me a faint smile. Her face had the underwater look of someone on serious painkillers.

“Let me fix your pillows,” I said. She curled forward and I gave them a few whacks, then stepped on a bar to raise the level of the bed a few inches.

“Thank you.” She gave me a searching look. “Are you here … to see the twins?”

Twins again. “No, I'm just here because of our driver,” I said. “He hijacked us.”

“They're right across the hall, waiting to transition. You should see them before they go, they're gorgeous.”

A nurse came in, a different unsmiling one. She looked at all of us disapprovingly and strode out, the soles of her shoes squeaking.

I went to the window. This wing overlooked a manicured expanse of grass that might be a golf course. The view was picturesque but static and depthless, like a film set.

Van leaned over Julie and said something into her ear. Then he tried to organize the nest of her sweat-dampened sheets. She coughed into a tissue and added it to a crumpled pile on the table beside her. There was blood on some; Winona saw it too, and gave me a look.

A humidifier in the corner of the room hissed out an opaque white V, like a lighthouse beam. Julie had a grip on Van's arm and now he had panic in his eyes.

The unsmiling nurse returned.

“I'm afraid I have to ask you all to leave, it's time for a perfusion.”

“Hey, we're done here anyway,” said Van brightly. He fumbled for something in his pocket.

“So Julie baby, I'm leaving you some tapes.” He put a couple old-fashioned cassettes on her lap and waggled one of them.

“You're singing on this one. You sound fantabulous. When you're better we'll work up that tune you always thought I should do. The Crystals song.”

Julie said nothing. She shut her eyes. Van tapped the edge of her bed.

“But I should go. I gotta go now. I'm running two days late.”

Winona rummaged in her bag and put a plastic Starbucks card on the night table. Julie opened her eyes.

“It's got at least fifteen dollars left on it,” Winona said.

“Thank you,” Julie said. “But we don't have Starbucks here.”

“But they're everywhere.”

“This isn't everywhere,” said Julie. “In case you haven't noticed.”

The other girls were out in the corridor, spying on the other rooms.

“That girl is not a happy camper,” Winona said to me, stopping at the open door of the room across the hall from Julie.

“Rebecca!” she said. “What are you doing here?”

A girl in a blue cardigan and skintight jeans leaned over two bassinets.

“I was just visiting the twins,” she said dreamily. She smiled at us.

I stepped into the room. Rebecca waved me closer.

“Aren't they beautiful? They're so much bigger than the last time.”

The babies, wrapped as tightly as cocoons, had blond hair, quite a bit of it. I watched the one in pink, her eyes moving beneath their lids as if following the action in a dream. The other baby made a comical series of grimaces, like a fast-forwarded training video on how to master facial expressions. I let the one in blue grip my index finger, a fierce grip that could support a chin-up. He held my gaze and I felt my face soften. Time eddied peacefully around us.
In another place
. The baby's solemn eyes were a milky blue, like my mother's.

Julie's nurse came in. The baby's hand uncurled.

“Oh, you're not supposed to be in here. These are in transit.”

“In transit? What do you mean—are they all right?”

“Of course,” the nurse said with a sharp look at me. “But visiting hours are over now.”

“Rebecca, hurry up,” said Winona, “or we'll miss our ride.”

“Just a minute.” Rebecca freed one small fist from the swaddling so the baby could suck on it. Which he did, noisily.

In the hall Winona and I stopped at a fountain, taking long sips from the arc of water. A sign on the door beside us said
HYDROTHERAPY
and I pushed it open. The tiled white room was empty except for a high-sided porcelain tub with hoselike attachments and a portable set of steps leading up to the lip, like a tiny Mayan shrine. Aha, I thought. The water feature.

A sound came from outside. Someone honking a horn.

Winona took my arm and stroked it like a cat. Rebecca caught up to us and took my other arm. We walked down the corridor like that and out into the peculiar sunlight, where Van was already behind the wheel.

 

Shovel My Walk

If it snows overnight, the silence in the early morning has a different quality, as if a duvet has fallen over the city. I lay there wondering how deep it was. Then I heard the scrape of a shovel, like winter clearing its throat. Our neighbor Barry was already out there, even before the snow had stopped or the plows came through. Sometimes it's a lovely sound, shoveling. Sometimes not.

It was mid-January. I was still in bed, dragging my heels about getting the ad copy in for Flo-Q's new line of indoor wave pools. “No more sand in your suit” didn't do it for Leanna, who oversees me. She doesn't like me calling her boss. “We're co-creators” she always says before slashing away at my copy. I gave her a little cartoon that I'd drawn, of a couple in bed beside a big standing wave in the lap pool. The wife is saying “Surf's up, at least.” Too negative, Leanna said. She was right.

I turned on my phone, then turned it off. I've been trying to stop tracking my novels on Amazon. The last time I checked,
The Bludgeoning
was in 789,470th place. Which is not the bottom, by a long shot. I repeated this to myself: “Not the bottom.” My therapist, Katrine, has instructed me to take every negative thought I have and turn it into a positive one, like doing origami. Newsprint into bluebirds. I've also started a gratitude journal. “I'm grateful to have started my gratitude journal” was the first entry. How can I be sarcastic even with myself? I know it's important to take the exercise seriously, but it feels like I'm joining a cult of one.

Gratitude does work, though. I can feel my thinking shift ever so incrementally toward the light, an ocean liner changing course. And whatever works, I want. Eric's affair (I mean, his recent remarriage) is still livid in my mind, like some ghastly patterned wallpaper that you can't not see every day as soon as you open your eyes. And I'm still waiting to hear back from that e-publisher about
Havoc
.

I should be starting something new, but I don't have the heart for it.

Another thing I realize is that writing is a mirror you can't trust. On Monday the words look supple and fit, a fine dancing partner. On Tuesday the same words look contrived and flat. Who cares?
Blah, blah, blah
. On the other hand, I do not trust people who never doubt, who just plunge on. They seem like babies.

I should get up and shovel the walk, I told myself as I lay there ruminating, the term Katrine prefers. The new mother across the street might be wrestling her stroller out there right now, her child encased in clear plastic like a bunch of bananas. And sometimes Barry clears our walk too, if I don't beat him to it.

I do like my new sheets, though. Navy flannel. Part of my positive embrace of winter. What is flannel, anyway? Is it shorn from some flannel beast, a sheep specially bred by IKEA? And I don't mind the way the gray light enters my room at this time of year in such a diplomatic way, easing me into the day. Especially when I do not get up until ten. Leanna doesn't care when I get up as long as I deliver by four thirty. That woman has an easy job.

So that's how my day begins, normally. But, and I want to get this down before it fades, this morning was different.

I rose at 9:20, and drew the curtains. More than a foot of snow had fallen. The cars parked across the street looked like desserts, white
îles flotantes
of meringue. Only Barry next door had already shoveled his way to the sidewalk, and was throwing down seedlets of blue chemicals to melt whatever was left. Affable Barry has had heart surgery and smokes, a lot, standing under his porch light. I do worry about the morning when he doesn't step out of his house to light up another cigarette, because he is often the first person I see when I leave the house—if, indeed, I leave the house—and the last person who sees me when I come home alone at night. I would miss Barry.

What was that song that Ryan wrote in high school, about our previous neighbor, a Portuguese man who insisted on pouring concrete over his yard even in the most lethal heat waves? “I Fear That My Neighbor Has Died.” Good song. I miss him, and Ceri too. Why did I encourage them to live in other countries?

I was about to step into the shower when I heard the doorbell ring. My Victorian house has a wonderful arrangement—a brass ring on the outside that you pull. Through a series of Rube Goldberg mechanisms linked by a cable, this causes a coiled metal strip to spring open and strike a brass bell that then rings loudly in my hall. Everyone, even the jaded postal person, admires the bell. It probably goes back to the year the house was built, 1896. In the nineteenth century, our midtown enclave of cottages and brick houses became the living quarters for the working men who built the rest of the city—a neighborhood where cabbage soup was a staple. Hence the name, Cabbagetown. Now, of course, the houses go for a million, even semidetached.