Summer People (26 page)

“Yeah, bring them. But can you call someone to find out what medication she's taking?”

“Yeah, I have phone numbers for her doctor and some relatives.”

“Okay, bring those, too. And do you know if Mrs. Broderick has a living will?”

Nathan was watching the other two paramedics as they hunched over Ellen, moving her onto a flat wooden board with handles cut into both sides. Ellen moaned as they strapped her down, one of them using his
gloved hand to pull a vomit-soaked lock of hair from her cheek, then securing her neck with a brace. Ellen's frightened blue eyes stared at the ceiling as Nathan felt the gravity of the paramedic's question weighing heavily upon him.

“I don't know. I'm not sure if she has one,” he said as they carried Ellen into the hall. The crew-cut man picked up the large canvas bag the men had used and carried it with him as he ushered Nathan along with his clipboard.

Nathan said, “I can try to get hold of her son to find out.”

“What relation are you?”

“I'm not any blood relation. I'm her helper,” Nathan said, although the irony of the words frightened him. He was half-drunk, trying not to get too close to anyone for fear they might smell his breath, and when asked several potentially life-or-death questions about Ellen, he had been virtually no help at all.

In the kitchen, Nathan grabbed two containers of Ellen's pills from the counter. But in the living room, on the desk, he could not find the piece of paper containing the phone numbers of Ellen's doctor and Glen. The desktop was a mess of old bills, invitations, letters, and flyers that Nathan sifted and resifted like a frantic magician who had misplaced the object everyone was waiting to see. Cursing, he grabbed his phone book and bounded out the front door.

Outside, the white-haired man who had broken up Nathan's fight with Thayer was standing with his wife within their screened-in front porch. Nathan nodded at them and glanced at Eldwin's house, but he saw no sign of Leah. The crew-cut paramedic helped Nathan into the back of the ambulance, where he sat on what looked like a large metal toolbox. The paramedic in back with him had sliced through the sleeve of Ellen's white cardigan and her dress to insert an IV. He attached to her chest a few probes that looked like the suction-cupped tentacles of a beeping monitor that was attached to the wall. Ellen stared wincingly at the harsh ceiling light and moved her lips as if attempting to speak.

“Ellen?” Nathan said, leaning in from his seat so she could see him. The
ambulance made a hairpin turn and he lurched forward, almost falling on top of her, until the paramedic extended a forearm that pushed Nathan back into his seat.

“You've got a seatbelt behind you,” the man said, checking to see if Ellen's IV had been disturbed.

As Nathan strapped on his seatbelt, he said, “I thought she was trying to say something.”

“Mrs. Broderick?” the man asked, leaning forward so that she could see his mustached face.

“Bill?”

“No, I'm not Bill,” he said, glancing at Nathan.

Nathan said, “Bill's not here right now, but he knows what happened, and he said to let you know he's thinking about you and is going to come see you.” He thought such a lie might help her find the will to survive. He squeezed her hand, and her eyelids fluttered, but otherwise her ashen face betrayed no response.

 

T
he thirty-minute ride to Brightonfield seemed to last an eternity, and even though Nathan felt relieved to have more qualified people now looking after Ellen's health, his relief didn't last very long. At the hospital, two of the paramedics wheeled Ellen's gurney through the emergency-room doors while Nathan and the crew-cut paramedic followed behind them. The man asked, “Do you have her son's number to call about the living will?”

“I don't have the number with me,” Nathan explained. “But if there's a phone I can use, I think I can call someone to get it.”

At the nurses' station, he dialed his father, but because his father did not keep a telephone in his bedroom, Nathan was not surprised when he didn't answer. He dialed the number at Ellen's house in Cleveland—optimistic about reaching Dora—and when she didn't answer, Nathan cursed, then dialed Ralph's private line.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it's Nathan. I'm glad you're there. Ellen's had—”

“Hello?”

“Ralph? It's Nathan. Can you hear me?”

“I can't hear you.”

“Ralph! It's Nathan. I'm at the—”

Ralph's voice said, “All right, all riiiiight. I can't get to the phone right now, but leave your message at the beep and I'll try and get back to you when I've finished testing out my Ruger Blackhawk revolver.” Gunfire—or at least what sounded like real gunfire—exploded from the receiver, followed by the opening chords of Guns n' Roses's “Welcome to the Jungle.” The answering machine finally beeped, and Nathan shook his head bitterly.

“Ralph, this is Nathan. I'm calling because Ellen has had a serious accident and I'm at the hospital trying to—”

There was a click, the clatter of a phone dropped and retrieved, then Ralph actually answered. “Hello? Nathan?”

“Ralph, for God's sake, man,” Nathan said, quickly telling him what had happened.

“Fuck, all right, hold on,” Ralph said. He rooted around in his room for what seemed like ages, then returned to the phone with Glen's number. Afterward he babbled something about maybe swinging by on his way up to Portland rather than on his way home, but Nathan was too distracted to listen closely. He mumbled, “Yeah, okay, keep me posted,” and hung up.

A broad-faced, bespectacled doctor took the number, and after watching him walk to the other side of the counter, toward a glassed-in office and a more private phone, Nathan glanced back at the waiting area. An old man sat sleeping with his mouth open in one of the blue plastic chairs, and a skinny, stringy-haired woman rocked a crying baby in her arms. Above them a TV had been bolted to the wall, broadcasting eruptions of laughter from an old episode of
Cheers.
Nathan wondered how much of the recycled laugh track was the laughter of people long since dead.

With the doctor still on the phone, Nathan walked to the far side of the room, where nurses had pulled a tan curtain around Ellen's bed. He had expected the partitioned space to be a hive of activity, but found only a
chubby female nurse checking the clear bag of liquid that dripped into Ellen's arm. Ellen looked much cleaner. Her hair—cleansed of most traces of blood and vomit—was pulled back from her closed eyes, revealing a dark crescent of broken blood vessels on her cheek.

“Is she going to be all right?” Nathan asked.

The nurse flashed a perfunctory smile, but as she began to explain how Nathan would need to talk to the doctor, the doctor appeared behind him and guided him a few steps outside the curtain. He was a short, compact man, with the kind of efficient, doctorly compassion Nathan sensed would disintegrate if he took more than a few minutes of his time.

The doctor said that Glen had been informed of the situation and would be faxing a copy of the living will. “Meanwhile we're going to send her to the ICU for some tests to find out what happened and what kind of injuries she might have sustained during her fall. We don't expect any dramatic changes overnight, and it's probably been a long night for you already. I'd go home and get some rest.”

Back inside the curtain, Ellen was sleeping, but Nathan felt the need to talk to her anyway. He told her things he wanted to be true: that the doctors would take great care of her, that Glen would be there soon, and that it wouldn't be long before they were back on the porch, watching sailboats tack lazily across the harbor while the sun set over the White Mountains. He was staring at her slackened, swollen face when two orderlies yanked back the curtain, like stagehands interrupting a scene.

He followed them as they wheeled Ellen past the waiting area, down the hall, toward a pair of swinging doors marked “Treatment Area—Patients Only.” As they approached the doors, one of the orderlies pointed to the sign and reminded Nathan that he would not be permitted to go with them any farther. Nathan held on to one of the swinging doors and watched through scratched Plexiglas as they continued wheeling Ellen down the hall.

 

T
he cab company said they could be there in half an hour, but Nathan told them he'd have to call them back. Dressed in a black polo shirt,
Eldwin was walking through the hospital's pneumatic doors, carrying his Bible. Nathan told him what had happened, and afterward Eldwin left his phone number with the receptionist in case the doctors thought it time for Ellen to receive her last rites.

Nathan stared at the heavy woman, waiting for her to smile and say that the need for last rites seemed unlikely, but she merely nodded and took his number, then answered a ringing phone.

On the way home, Eldwin explained that he must have been in the shower at the time of the accident, but that a next-door neighbor had told him what had happened while Eldwin was outside emptying his trash.

“Was Leah still there when you left?” Nathan asked.

“I'm not sure. I think she may have already left. I thought she'd gone over to visit you.”

“We were going to try and meet up later.”

In the dim glow of the dashboard lights, Nathan reflected on the questions that had haunted him since he'd found Ellen bleeding on the floor: What would have happened if he had gone out as usual that evening with Leah? What if he had not found Ellen until morning? To escape such contemplation, he asked, “Do you do a lot of this back in Boston? Visiting people in hospitals?”

“Not too much. Russ—Pastor Russell—he still does a lot of it. I usually do it once every couple of months.”

“Seems like it would be pretty emotionally exhausting work.”

“It is and it isn't. You get used to it, I think, and it's not as if I'm bringing them bad news. People are usually pretty relieved that I'm there.”

“What exactly is it that you do when you're giving someone the last rites?” Nathan asked. The evangelical minister of his mother's church—a rosy-cheeked man with thinning hair—had performed them for her the day she died. But Nathan had been outside the room, struggling with a soda machine and simply wandering the halls, so that when he returned, the pastor had already left. His mother, lips cracked and flaking, tried to smile at him as he apologized and broke down, bringing her hand to his cheek. Even if he wasn't sure he believed in it, he'd wanted to ease her passage into the
new life she thought she was about to begin.

Eldwin sighed, “Well, there's anointing the person with oil, and offering communion if the person's able to receive it, but it's mostly a series of prayers. The ritual is supposed to remind the person that they're part of something much larger than themselves, which can be a comfort to them before they die.”

Outside, strip malls and corner gas stations gave way to fenced yards and then the dark blur of passing forest. As they turned down Oceanside Avenue, traveling the narrow stretch of land between the Atlantic and the cove, Nathan asked, “Where does your faith come from?”

“Where does my faith come from?” Eldwin repeated. He was searching one of the car's cup holders for his cigarettes.

“Yeah. I mean, how do you explain why you believe what you believe?”

Eldwin said, “Well. I can't explain human suffering, why it happens, but the way I usually answer this question is to say imagine a circle. And say that circle represents
all
there is to know about the universe. And keep in mind that the Hubble telescope has detected something like fifty million galaxies and is still finding more, so we don't even have any evidence that the universe ends. It may be infinite. But let's say that the circle represents all that there is to know about the universe and how it works. Everything humanity has learned about cosmology, history, physics, biology, and everything else that remains to be learned.” Eldwin lit his cigarette, then used his finger to draw a large circle in the thin layer of dust on the windshield. “Now put your finger up there and make a dot to represent how much you know.”

Nathan put his finger inside the circle and left a fingerprint.

“Whoa, bold.”

“Ah well,” Nathan said, smiling, raising his finger to diminish the fingerprint but only making it larger. “Shit.”

From the corner of his mouth, Eldwin exhaled a stream of smoke that curled out of the window. “Yeah…realistically I probably wouldn't even make a mark on there that you could see. I know so little about the universe, I can't make any reasonable assertion about the order of things, or
about whether that order negates or affirms the existence of God. I can only have faith, either in the absence or presence of God, and I choose to believe in God's presence.”

“Why not in God's absence?”

“Well, partially because of those strange things or patterns I told you about that have happened to me in my life. But also because I think belief comes naturally if your perspective on the universe is both deep and broad enough.”

“Are you saying
belief
comes naturally to you, or the longing? Because I'm with you if you're saying the longing.”

“I think I'm saying both.”

Eldwin had stopped the car in Ellen's driveway. It was late and he did not cut the engine. Nathan thanked him, and Eldwin said to let him know if there was anything else he could do. Then Nathan climbed out of the car. A few of the house lights were still on, and he opened the front door quietly, out of habit. But glancing up at the staircase, it occurred to him that for the first time all summer, he was in the large house all alone.

The Son's Arrival ~ Ellen Awakes ~ Mr. McAlister Accuses Nathan of Intemperance ~ Nathan Rattles His Father ~ An Unforeseen Houseguest

N
athan went to bed that evening with his door ajar. The following morning, a strangled metallic crash caused his eyes to flutter open. Stumbling into Ellen's bedroom in his boxers, he flopped over the bed and picked the heavy rotary phone up from where it had fallen onto the floor.

“Nathan?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you all right?” It was Glen.

“Yeah, I'm okay,” Nathan said, trying to untangle the cord and lift the rest of the phone from beneath the nightstand.

“Have you heard anything from my mother's doctor?”

“No, I haven't.” Nathan rolled over to sit upright on the bed. “I mean not since the doctor said they were going to run tests on her last night. Have you?”

“No, nothing yet. The doctor told me what I guess you told him, but could you just tell me again what happened?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Nathan said. He took care to omit the parts about his having been semidrunk and almost leaving Ellen to die in her own blood and vomit, and not having been able to find the emergency numbers Glen had given him. But otherwise he told the story as it had happened.

Glen sighed. “Well, she's very fortunate to have had you there.”

“Well, I'm very glad to have been here.” Nathan glanced at the hands of Ellen's old alarm clock. Nine forty-five. “I was just finishing up breakfast here and was about to head over to see her.”

“All right, well, I'm on the plane now, but I'll be landing in Portland about eleven, and then I'll take a taxi over.”

Nathan said, “Oh. Well. Why don't I come pick you up?”

 

T
his allowed no time for breakfast or bathing, but what else could he do? He dressed, hurriedly scrubbed the dark, vaguely Texas-shaped stain of blood and crusted vomit on Ellen's carpet, then drove at a steady seventy-five with his window down, wondering how to recognize Glen. A photo of him had sat on the grand piano at Ellen's home in Cleveland, but Nathan remembered only that in the photo he'd had a beard. From conversations with his father, Nathan knew that Glen had used some of the family money to buy an enormous ranch in Wyoming, where he now lived with his wife. He did not need to work but taught occasionally at the state college and every few years published a book about the paleontological history of Wyoming.

Having a vague sense of Glen's fondness for western country, Nathan had been expecting someone cowboy lean, but the burly, bearded man near the baggage claim seemed naggingly familiar. He was wearing old blue Teva sandals, faded jeans, and an untucked T-shirt with printed, multicolored frogs hopping across his barrel chest. While other men sat on an unfilled row of plastic chairs, holding paperback thrillers or balancing laptops, the bearded man sat cross-legged on the carpet. He was reading
Non-Dinosaurian Lower Vertebrates Across the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary in Northeastern Montana.

“Glen?”

“Hey, Nathan?” Glen pulled off his old, tinted glasses and let them dangle against his chest. His eyes were milky blue, like his mother's, and his shaggy, peppery black beard helped disguise his narrow lips. They shook hands and Glen slipped his book into a beat-up army duffel bag with g. broderick stenciled on the cloth, then led them toward the exit with the bouncing stride of a younger man.

“Have you heard anything more?” Glen asked.

“No, nothing yet.”

The drive to Brightonfield took half an hour, and although the conversation revolved mostly around Ellen, Nathan learned that Glen had gone to boarding school, then the army, then to college in Wyoming, where not long afterward, he'd purchased the ranch. There was an understated pride in the way he spoke of the choices that had brought him so far from the world of clubs and yachts and cocktail parties—the world of Brightonfield Cove—but he evidently had a tremendous fondness for his mother.

“How have you and the old girl been getting along this summer?”

“Pretty good, I think.”

Glen stared out the window. “I'm sure she's very fond of you.”

“She was in the hospital last summer, too?”

“Yeah, I was telling this to the doctor last night. Mother has had a few mini-strokes over the last couple of years, and I was wondering whether that might be what caused her to fall.”

“Is that what they think might have caused the accident with the car?”

Glen's face clouded as he shook his head. “No—they weren't able to say for sure what happened then.” Later, fingering his mountain man–style beard, he asked, “What happened to your head?”

Nathan touched his bruise and glanced at Glen, wondering how much the man knew. He hesitated, but then said, “Your mom and I were driving around one day and she asked me to drive up to what I thought was a friend's house, but the woman who met us on the porch was actually
Mr. McAlister's wife. She told us to leave, and we did, but her grandson was angry that we came, so he and his friends jumped me a few nights ago when I was outside by myself.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I'm fine.”

“Why were they angry with
you
?”

Nathan shrugged.

“Have you had any trouble with them since then?”

“I haven't seen them,” Nathan said. He smiled wanly because he already regretted telling such an edited version of what had happened. He was driving Glen to Brightonfield Cove, after all, where the man surely knew people who would be happy to update him on all that he had missed by being away. Glen turned, shaking his head, and gazed out at the passing restaurants and gas stations of Brightonfield. “I'm very sorry that happened.”

Nathan couldn't figure out a good way to fill in the details of the story, so he tried convincing himself that perhaps Glen, who did not seem to be in love with Brightonfield Cove, would stay at a hotel in Brightonfield—to be closer to his mother—and not visit the Cove at all. While nurturing this hope, Nathan realized that Glen had not breathed a word about his mother's desire to visit the home of Mr. McAlister's wife. But Nathan did not ask him for his thoughts. He understood the compulsion to believe—despite mounting evidence to the contrary—that one's mother was going to be all right.

At the hospital they took the elevator to the third floor, then walked in silence to Ellen's room. She was on the near side of the room's curtain, propped up in bed, white sheets pulled up to her waist. The crown of her head had been shaved and a white bandage had been applied like a strapped-on yarmulke. Tubes ran into her nose and right arm, and her left cheekbone had turned so densely purple it was almost black.

“Oh, Momma,” Glen whispered, standing beside her and grasping her hand. Ellen's watery eyes half-opened to stare at him, then at Nathan; but her swollen face revealed no emotion. Nathan patted her foot
where it poked up beneath the tight bedsheet. He told her how relieved he was to see that she was doing better than last night. But she didn't really seem better. She looked miserable. She didn't speak. And when she closed her eyes again, Nathan didn't know what else to say. The silence overwhelmed him. He whispered to Glen that he was going to step outside and use the restroom. Glen nodded distractedly as he smiled down at his mother.

“It's Glen, Momma. Do you want to squeeze my hand if you recognize me?” he asked, only he couldn't get all the words out. His voice rose a little before it caught, and he clenched his quavering jaw shut.

 

N
athan didn't need to use the toilet, but the restroom was empty, so he locked himself in a stall, put the seat down, and sat with his chin in his hands. He spent several minutes wondering about Ellen, and what he would do with the rest of the summer, until a heavy-breathing guy entered the stall beside him, grunting out sounds like someone squeezing a bottle of clogged shampoo. Nathan fled and didn't breathe until he was back in the hospital hallway.

A lean Indian doctor was standing outside Ellen's room, his smock so perfectly white that his skin looked like tanned leather. He stared down through bifocals at the clipboard in his hand, his index finger crooked beneath his lip, then he entered the room.

Nathan lingered near a leafy plant and sat down in one of three blue plastic chairs wedged into a corner of the hallway. He picked up a copy of
Us Weekly
that lay on the end table. The magazine opened to show photos of stars performing the same boring chores he often performed. Taking out the trash, loading groceries, paying the pizza delivery person. In this way the stars were just like Nathan. In case this fact had been lost on him, the photographs had been lumped together beneath the banner “Stars—They're Just Like Us!” He flipped a few pages and was reading about how Meg Ryan was starting over with a new life
and
a new love, when, glancing up, he was startled to see Glen approaching. Nathan rolled the magazine into a tube.

“Did you find the restroom?” Glen asked, rubbing his nose, his lilting tone belied by the watery pinkness of his eyes.

“Yeah, I was just waiting out here while you talked with the doctor. Do they have the results back from last night?”

“Well, he knows my mother has had her mini-strokes over the last couple of years, but right now it doesn't look like it was another stroke that caused her to fall into the bureau last night. So that's good news. It looks like she just fell, but the trauma to her head caused a hematoma, which he says is clotting in the space between her brain and her skull, so that bandage on her head is where they had to drill to relieve the pressure.” Glen clamped his lips and sniffed as if he'd just smelled something malodorous. “The doctor thinks that with some rehabilitation, she should be able to recover.”

Nathan nodded and said, “That's great. She's tough. I'm sure she's going to be all right.”

When they reentered the room, Nathan was surprised to see Ellen smile lopsidedly at them.

“Hello, Momma,” Glen said. He smiled warmly as he sat down in the chair he'd pulled beside her. “I was just talking to your doctor and he says you must be a tough old girl to have hit your head so hard and still be able to call for help.”

“Oh?” Ellen croaked, but then she glanced at Nathan as if wanting him to make sense of what Glen had just said. Nathan blathered on about how relieved he was to hear she was going to be all right, but her eyes shifted from his face to his chest, and his words trailed off into silence. Ellen lifted her arm from the tight bedsheet and pointed a bony finger at Nathan's heart. He moved closer toward the bed as she extended her arm and pressed her fingers against him. She pulled a golden hair from his shirt and held it a few inches from her face. It was a hair from Ellen's golden retriever Rainier. The dog's hairs were everywhere in Ellen's car and Nathan was constantly picking them from his clothes. “Rainier's hair,” Nathan said. He smiled, but Ellen's cloudy blue eyes were still uncertain. She slowly set the hair down on the white bedsheet and shook her
head. She could not remember, Nathan thought. But Glen's eyes flickered with expectation. “Ol' Rainier sheds a lot doesn't she, Momma,” he said quietly, more as a statement than a question, so it wouldn't seem so bad when she didn't answer.

 

W
hen Glen asked him later if he might like to go home and rest, Nathan was eager to get back to try and disguise how he had nearly torched the family's home. Much of the damage was cosmetic, just a layer of soot, and a vigorous scrubbing with soap and bleach (as well as an arsenal of different brushes) wiped away more than Nathan had allowed himself to hope for. He scrubbed for almost an hour, the sun scorching the back of his neck, but after spending so much of the day at the hospital watching baseball on Ellen's television, the labor felt good, as if he was sloughing off the sickness he'd felt creeping up on him while he was there. When he finished, the broad column of ash that once stood a yard high had been reduced to the burned edge of a clapboard and a narrow, foot-high streak of faded gray. Nathan pushed the grill closer to the wall, hoping to cover up the charred clapboard until he had time to paint. To reward himself for his hard work, he mixed a drink and lay down on the shaded floorboards of the porch. Amid thoughts of Leah and his immediate future, he was also dully aware of how exhausting the last sixteen hours had been. His arm made a surprisingly comfortable pillow. Drifting in and out of sleep, Nathan tried to listen for the sound of a car in the gravel driveway. He wasn't expecting the heavy footsteps that suddenly made the floor tremble.

“Are you drunk?” Mr. McAlister asked.

Nathan sprang into a sitting position, squinting at the bright white of the porch. “No, I'm not drunk.” He wiped the beginnings of drool from his mouth and glimpsed down at his nearly empty glass of rum and Coke. “I was just taking a nap.”

Mr. McAlister watched him with gimlet eyes. “How's Ellen?”

“She's at the hospital.” Nathan began to tell him the story about what had happened, but Mr. McAlister cut him off.

“I saw her at the hospital this morning.”

“Oh.”

“Have you been to see her yet?”

“Yeah. I was there this morning, too. I picked Glen up at the airport and then we headed over. We must have just missed you.”

In a tone less scolding, Mr. McAlister offered, “She looked like she must have hit that bureau pretty hard.”

“Yeah. But the doctor says he thinks she's probably going to be all right. He says he doesn't think it was another stroke.”

“Well, that's good news, huh?”

“Yeah. It's great news,” Nathan said, now awake enough to be irritated by Mr. McAlister's initial, presumptive anger. “Do you think it was a mini-stroke that might have caused her to drive her car into those rocks last summer?”