Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 02 - Spring Moon (24 page)

“Thank you, Angel. It feels better now.”

She smiled and struggled to get put down and back on her ride. Away she went. Jon pushed me over to Mom and Arthur at the picnic table. Mom had Chance propped up on her lap and waved his hand at me as we got near. His silly hand waving didn’t match the riveted look on his face. He pedaled his legs and squawked, as I got close.

“He knows me,” I said to Jon.

“Hi, Sweetie,” said Mom. “I like your haircut.”

She started to cry. Chance rotated his head like an owl, looked at her, and then he started to cry. Meggie pulled up on her trike, took one look at the cryfest and she started in. I finally threw in the towel and joined them. My mother has a miraculous way of focusing the attention on herself and then taking everyone down with her. Arthur, aka The Saint, handed Chance to Jon and picked up Meggie which meant getting whatever was on her grimy hands on his impeccably clean white shirt.

“Come on, Angel, it’s time for a snack,” he said. “Jackie, you bring her trike.”

He kissed the top of my head.

“You’re a beautiful cat,” he said.

Meggie stopped crying. Arthur had that effect on her. He leaned her over so she could give me a kiss on the ear. Her panty little breath was sweet.

“Don’t hop, Mama.”

“Okay, Angel.”

Mom apologized as she gathered their things.

“Is that a hickey, Mom?”

“Very funny, Hannah. You slept in your own bed when you were her age.”

“She’s upset, Mom. You should knock off the Nutella if you want her to sleep. You’re filling her up with sugar. She likes almond butter on celery.”           

Mom stuck her tongue out at me and caught up with Arthur and Meggie who were headed to the car.

“Did you see that?” I asked Jon.

“Yeah, it’s time for you to come home. I’ve lost control of the situation. She’s a bad influence on the House Elf. Things aren’t as spotless as usual. They’ve got a bridge table set up on the lanai. They play bridge while Chance swills Karo and Megs and Chop lick Nutella off a spoon.”

He dug containers of sushi out of a bed of ice and loaded chopsticks.

“I don’t want you to have to take care of me all the time,” I said.

“I can take care of you.”

“I’m so sorry to throw such a monkey wrench into your life,” I said.

He stopped the chopsticks halfway to my mouth.

“When did it become just my life?” he asked.

“I just meant that you’ve had to do everything. All the worrying. All the decision-making. You bring me all my meals. I have nothing to offer in return.”

“Would you do it for me?”

“Of course,” I said. “I love you more than anyone on the planet.”

“I love you more than anyone on or off the planet,” he said.

“Off the planet? Every parallel universe?”

“Every parallel universe of every parallel universe times infinity. This isn’t about it being a fair trade as you once said. We’re not keeping score here.”

“When did I say that?”

“After we first met and you were back in L.A. yelling and hanging up on me. You said you’d exchanged sex for me taking care of you. Something like that. That it was a fair trade.”

“I did not.”

“Oh yeah, you did. It’s the one thing you said in all the yelling that made me consider not calling you again. I’d never been accused of bartering for sex.”

“I’m sorry I insulted you.”

“You insulted yourself. I might barter.”

“Why did you call me again?”

“I decided you had good reason to be upset, so I’d give you a one time pass.”

“That was big of you. I haven’t said it again.”

“You just came pretty close.”

“Well, marriage is a partnership,” I said.

“For life, H. Not just this week or this year. I’m in this for the long haul. Sometimes I wonder about you.”

“I am too.”

“You don’t have to say that because you’re hungry. Even if you told me today that you were leaving me, I’d be here feeding you until you’re whole.”

“Because I’m the mother of your children.”

He looked at me like maybe he was going to poke my eyes out with the chopsticks. I hoped they didn’t have wasabi on them. Chance was glued to his face. Poor kid. He was trapped living next to parents who were either slathering all over each other while they prayed to oh god Jesus okay Hannah, or who were dickering about who was going to begrudgingly feed whom in the year twenty-seventy. Humor rippled across Jon’s face.

“You’ve always been like wrestling an octopus,” he said. “I’d let you eat hospital food if that’s all it was. I’m going to love you at the end of this. I’m pretty basic that way. I don’t waste time making the same decision over and over.”

“Okay. Well. Ditto for me.”

“That’s it?”

“Can I have pudding now?”

“It’s not pudding. Sherry shipped a rhubarb pie. You can’t have any until you eat sushi. You want wasabi in your soy sauce?”

“Are you going to poke me in the eye with a chopstick?”

“Not if you have your mouth open.”

He fed me with one hand and held a bottle for Chance in the other. Chance had his eyes closed.

“I love how he closes his eyes when he eats,” I said. “It must help him concentrate.”

“He’s pretending it’s you,” said Jon.

“How are you doing with that? Not having me around to take advantage of.”

“I’m handling it.”

He was focused on getting loaded chopsticks to my mouth while keeping the bottle attached to Chance. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I was smiling at him. He looked into my eyes and said, “Literally.”

I started laughing. Chance opened his eyes, broke contact, kicked his feet a few times and smiled.

“He loves to hear his mama laugh,” said Jon.

I spent the afternoon sleeping. Jimmy came in at the end of the day and stuck me full of needles. A few were notable.

“That was a zinger,” I said. “Like an electric shock.”

He nodded and sadistically stuck in a few more.

“I felt it when Meggie and Chance sparked to life,” I said. “Have you heard of that?”

“Most doctors think you’re feeling ovulation.”

“Most doctors are men and have no idea what they’re talking about. This was different. It was like a tiny star exploded in a distant galaxy. I had a vision of bursting white light in a dark red space.”

“Did you feel it last time?”

“No. What do you think?”

“I think we are energy, in a field of energy that we emerge from and go back to.”

“That’s elastic.”

“Elastic?”

“Well it’s not like a grinding karmic wheel where what we were before determines what we are next. Trudging toward enlightenment, hoping to hell we got something right last time around. Blaming mishaps on bad karma. I don’t see a big difference between that and being born with original sin. You start out with a strike or two against you. Not that I know much about any of it. Do you believe in karma?”

“I don’t think of it as circular,” he said. “But I do think the energy we manifest in this life has resonance down the road.”

“Resonance sounds like karma,” I said. “I’ve decided that religion is just about who controls the outcome, the individual or some god. God is just another word for karma. Piss him off and he clobbers you with a setback. So I guess it’s always the individual. Maybe praying is just a vision board without the board. I should probably start praying. Do our bodies know the future?”

“You have a busy mind,” he said.

“I know. I’ll be quiet.”

“Just while I do this.”

“Oh brother,” I said.

He smiled while he tapped in the last of the needles then sat down to work his puzzle. I thought about the idea of knowing the future. I had known that my father was going to die, but that was it. The rest of my life was nothing but big fat surprises coming around blind curves. A cosmic roulette wheel.

“Are you married?” I asked.

“I live with someone,” he said.

“Do you have children?”

“We have dogs. We might adopt.”

“Should I be quiet?”

“You should focus on healing. That’s what we’re doing here now,” he said.

“Be here now. Ram Dass. My father had that book. I loved the cover art, words in a circle. I had a lover, well, for two nights, named Alan Watts. I talked to him a few weeks ago.”

“Be here now,” he said.

“Okay. I don’t meditate though.”

“I believe that.”

Jon brought dinner from Penny. Penny follows recipes as religiously as my mother avoids them.

“They joked about sending you a Nutella crepe,” said Jon.

“Oh brother. They need to leave.”

“Yep. How’s that taste?”

“It’s good.”

“It’s Penny flat,” he said.

“It’s home cooking.”

He fed me bites of healthy Penny flat food while I related what I could remember of my far-ranging conversation with Jimmy. Jimmy thought my jump up in mental energy, as wacky as it was, was a sign that I was reentering this energy plane.

I watched Jon’s eyes as he wiped my face with a wet washcloth. He was looking for every smidgen like he did with Meggie.

“I love to look at your face,” I said. “I love your voice, I hear it in my belly first. I was barely alive, but I could feel your voice over the guy’s phone on the cliff. I love your hands and your laugh. I love your intelligence and that you’re nice to people. I love to make love with you. I never get tired of it. I love how gentle you are with our children.”

He stopped wiping my face and stared at me like I’d sprouted Hiroshima heads. He probably figured it was the drugs talking.

“I know I don’t tell you that,” I said. “But I think it all the time. And it’s not because I’m stoned either.”

He sat back and squinted out the window like he was trying to get something into focus without putting on his glasses. He looked back at me and smiled.

“Ditto,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “We should send the rescue guys gift certificates for meals.”

“We did.”

I didn’t get to go home the next day, or the next. My finger wasn’t healing as quickly as they hoped. Jon brought food and babies. Our parents went home and he was more relaxed with Kaia’s cousin there during the day and having his lanai back.

Jane came by. I was in coasting mode. Jimmy did his needles. He worked on me twice a day and we continued our obscure conversations about the elastic energy field, which I had started visualizing as a bullfrog throat sack. I was stuck in the hospital with a vivid imagination and no baby bullfrog.

I proposed the idea that a mating frog’s throat sack was a microcosm of life expanding from the elastic field. Now you don’t see it, now you do. Mating is the beginning, or I guess it is. You have to draw the starting line somewhere. Patterns repeat. Outer space through a telescope looks like inner space under an electron microscope. We keep telling ourselves it’s different, it isn’t, but unless we tell ourselves that, we couldn’t find our way to the grocery store, or Walmart.

No one rushed in to record my musings like I was Stephen Hawking. I didn’t solve any sudoku puzzles. Though I decided he needed to just guess sometimes when he was stuck on a problem. I also decided it was obvious that the universe expands, and then contracts, like a bullfrog throat sack. We were getting all wound up over frog bellows. We thought we were on the ride out, if so, somewhere down the line there would be a ride in. Then another deep breath and kablooey, right back out again. Ribit. I had too much time to tumble thoughts. The needles were percolating and Jimmy was working his puzzle when I started laughing.

He looked at me and smiled.

“I was just thinking about the spark I felt with the babies. Is that what they mean by the big bang theory?”

He was quiet. I was still laughing even though it made my nose hurt like hell. Goddess help me, I was getting goofy.

“You know,” I said, “as opposed to the little bang theory, when you’re just banging?”

“Banging?”

“That’s right, Dr. Bangers and Mash, you call it sodding. Anyway, that’s what it is, a big bang. Creation. The universe beginning again. Jon said it is the universe after all. You know, like uni-verse, unified, all one verse, a single story. I have a friend who reads scripts for the studios; she says there is only one story. I need to ask her what it is. I guess it’s like the ocean in a single drop. You know what I mean?”

“I think I do.”

“Jon left the playing field at string theory, but he keeps up some. He read an article by a physicist at Harvard while I was taking a nap. She thinks she got a ping from out there. Might be tiny evidence of the ninety-eight percent of what is, that we have no way of seeing with our carbon based eyeballs.”

“She called them carbon based eyeballs?”

“No. I just made that up. Jon’s a mathematician. He likes binoculars, counting, measuring. I’m going to buy him a telescope. It always boils down to our ears and eyeballs and what our minds can make of it. Pretty limited when you think about it. I have a kaleidoscope. I don’t know what that says about me. I’m fragmented? I like my own interpretation? Jon would probably agree with that. Who doesn’t?”

He stood up and wiggled a few of the needles.

“Be now here,” he said.

Not a chance. I lay there thinking about eyeball interpretations. When my first husband looked at the world through his eyeballs, all he saw was
no
. After our first year, I started thinking of him as Mister No. I never told him that because if there’s one thing Mister Nos know, it’s that their concept of reality is
the reality
. His outer mantra was: 
It Can’t Be Done
. His inner mantra was: 
I Don’t Think I Can
. Life in concrete boots.

When Jon looked out, he thought
yes
. Or at least
maybe
. Knowing that fundamental concept of reality in a person can save you a world of grief. Even more than meeting their parents first. I’d have to remember to tell Meggie and Chance to run, not walk, from the
Nos
of the world. Good thing I stayed alive. A month ago I wouldn’t have known to put that in their letter. I looked over at Jimmy working his puzzle.