Arcadia (30 page)

Back into the woods, toward what he vaguely remembers to be the waterfall, the trail grows narrower, more overgrown. Hannah, when she could still walk, probably didn’t make it this far to trample down the weeds. Two years of growth have almost swallowed the path. The day dims into twilight. He catches spiderwebs with his cheeks.

He comes into a natural clearing, and a shriek startles his heart to flapping.

Grete stands at the far side, clutching a stick like a baseball bat, her face paper white.

Dad, she says in a wobbly voice. Oh, I’m so glad it’s you.

Lost? he says. He tries not to smile. What luck to find his daughter the one time he wasn’t looking for her.

She shrugs. Kind of, she says. But mostly I thought you were a bear.

He takes a photo of her as she picks toward him over the grasses in the last slant of sun. She stops when she is near. She stinks of sweat, has scratches on her face and brambles in her many pink braids, and her face is raw as if she’s been crying. She must have been out here for hours. They are miles from the Sugarbush. On her own, she wouldn’t have been back until deep in the night, if not the morning.

It’s this way, he says, gesturing into the throat of the woods.

Okay, she says. She starts, but stops and turns to him. I just. I’m sorry.

I know, he says.

I’m scared, she says. I don’t want to watch Grannah die.

Me neither, he says, pulling her toward him.

Grete’s teeth clatter. It is colder up here, away from the city; although it’s still late winter, he remembers summer nights so long ago, filled with exactly this fresh dampness, as if exhaled from underground. They come out into the Sugarbush when it’s dark, and the moon fills the tree limbs with a shifting, breathing light. The other houses sit in darkness, ownerless: Midge in Boca Raton for the rest of her days, Titus and Sally having died in a terrible car accident years ago, Scott and Lisa with too many houses to care much about the cottage they’d built in protest of Erewhon twelve years ago.

Bit and his daughter stand out on the porch of the Green house, unwilling to breathe the bad spores of Hannah’s sadness into their lungs.

Up the drive, however, come headlights. The car stops and the engine shuts off. A woman emerges, saying, Stone? This is Stone house?

Nurse Luisa? Bit says, remembering the name Astrid had mentioned yesterday. He flicks on the porch light and sees a very small woman shuffling up the steps. Her face is cracked with a broad grin; she wears a child’s pink backpack high like an extra hump on her shoulders. I lost for half hour! she says. So glad I find you!

The nurse surprises Grete with a hug. When she turns to Bit, she squeezes him fiercely around the middle and says, I come to make things easier. Now. Have anyone eaten dinner?

No, Bit says, and Luisa clucks. In you go, she says. Make the dinner.

Oh, he says. It’s been a long day. Nobody’s very hungry, I think, Luisa.

She beams up into Bit’s face and says, Times like this? Schedules are lifeboat. Make the dinner, make the breakfast, make the bed. It will help to be strict with yourself.

He likes this bossy Luisa, this plain brown woman, a stranger but familiar as an aunt. She pats his arm and gives him a little push inside.

He brings his mother a bowl of soup. She doesn’t open her eyes but accepts half the bowl in spoonfuls. How like a baby bird, he thinks, seeing her open her mouth, her eyes swollen shut, the skin so thin against the bones of her skull. Or, simply, a baby: tiny Grete gazing at him solemnly over a spoon full of pureed peas.

He goes to the closet to find Hannah another blanket. The night is cold, and the window was left open too long for the house to have retained its warmth. When he opens the door, Abe’s smell rises to Bit from the clothes: that clean sweat of him, the metal of him. The lingering last ghost of his father sideswipes him. He knows it’s absurd, but he closes the door to save a little of his father for later.

All weekend, Hannah won’t get out of bed save to drag herself to the bathroom. She sips at the soup Bit makes and only nibbles at the toast. Luisa comes at nine every night and leaves at five, and though it isn’t her job to clean, the house is scoured when he wakes in the morning.

Hannah still won’t talk to him, not a word.

On Monday morning, Grete is eating the last of the granola in the jar. Her face is so carefully made up that Bit stares at her. She touches her cheek and frowns. War paint, she says.

You’re going to blow these country kids’ minds, Bit says.

What if I don’t? she says.

Then they’re brain-dead, he says. Then they don’t have minds to blow.

She sighs and washes out the bowl. What are we going to do about Hannah? she says. She needs to get up. There’s no point in us being here if she doesn’t make any effort to be human.

If she hasn’t gotten out of bed by tonight, we’ll get her up ourselves, he says.

Okay, Grete says. She shoulders her backpack and says, with Hannah’s old wryness, Goody. That’ll give me something to look forward to while I’m getting wedgied.

They drive in silence to the school, and he gently takes her hand when she begins to chew her nails to the quick. In the drop-off area of the squat brick high school, Bit sits with Grete, gazing at the flickering clumps of students.

Boys, Grete says, frowning. They watch the boys buffooning around, and Grete says, I think I’m already starting to miss the all-girls’ pedagogical model.

Bit laughs. I’m having bad flashbacks of my first day in real school, he confesses. If I can give you any advice, it’s to smile and be cool.

Smile and be cool, she mocks him. She squeezes his hand. Then she squares her shoulders like a diver at the end of the board and steps gracefully out. A sudden magnet, his tall, bony daughter with her pink hair in this sea of sweatpants and hunting camouflage. Even in his car, Bit can feel the weight of the attention upon her. He has to pull away to stop himself from leaping out after Grete and dragging her safely home.

He sits in the dark room with Hannah. All day, he tries to feed her soft fresh bread he’s baked and reads her
Tristram Shandy
to make her laugh; she refuses both. Her breathing is labored. Radio, she commands, and he listens with her to a radical homemaking show (how to make dandelion wine; how to set your own broken bones) and, for as long as he can stay in his seat, to the news. They’re now calling the pandemic SARI, for severe acute respiratory infection. Oops, says Bit. Sorry! But Hannah doesn’t laugh.

Over seven thousand people are dead; the disease has spread to Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China, San Francisco, Adelaide in Australia. The Centers for Disease Control, gutted by low federal taxes, have sent out a strongly worded warning for people to avoid hospitals and flights, and nobody is doing much more. Bit stands, agitated. Although it’s early to pick up Grete, he lets himself be chased from the house by the news. First, he’ll stop in town to pick up vegetables and coffee and tofu and rice milk. Muffin’s mothers still run the natural-foods store in town, and they fall upon Bit when he comes in. He finds himself squashed in a middle-aged lesbian sandwich smelling of herbal cough drops and celery. Cheryl and Diana cry, now, as they hadn’t cried at Abe’s memorial service.

Abe was the most practical man, says Cheryl. Infuriating as hell, but
always
got his way.

He was the last person in the world I thought would do what he did, Diana says. We always thought Hannah . . . And she trails off, stricken, bulging her eyes at her wife.

That’s why Abe succeeded and Hannah didn’t, Bit says when the surge of pain has faded.

They show him pictures of Muffin’s children, all eight owlish in glasses, shirts buttoned up to their throats. Missionaries, Cheryl says with a snort. With two old heathens like us, it makes you wonder where all that religion came from.

Before Bit leaves, Diana hugs him and whispers in his ear, You’ll get your mother out of it. You always do.

Then she holds up a carrot from their garden. It is an odd, mutant thing that looks like two human bodies twined in coitus. Show Hannah this, she says. Our Kama Sutra carrot. We’ve been saving it for a special occasion. Alone in the car again, holding the lewd thing in his hand, Bit hears the ladies’ jollity ring in his ears and it makes him glad.

When Grete comes out of the school, he is so flushed with relief his hands tremble. She walks slowly, but her chin is dangerously high. She gets in the car and won’t speak.

Halfway home, desperate, he says, At least you have all your limbs, and she says a brief Ha! Then she says, Let’s just call it an interesting sociological experiment; and she won’t say any more.

Bit can barely park before Grete leaps from the car. She marches into Hannah’s room and throws open the curtains. That’s it, she says. That’s enough. She disappears into the bathroom and begins running the water in the tub.

Bit picks his mother up. He expects her to be light, but she is dense and he almost drops her. With great effort, he carries her into the bathroom. Whoa, he says. Grete has loaded the water with so much bubblebath that the foam is already a foot high.

What? she says. She smells bad. No offense, Grannah, but you stink.

You
stink, whispers Hannah. She is crying. Both of you. You stink.

Together, Bit and his daughter unzip the dress and pull it down over Hannah’s arms and belly. They peel off the support garments unseen in the world for ten years: a bra pointy as a pair of missiles, sad orangey hose, a potato sack for underwear. They help her into the tub, bending her stiff limbs. She is still wearing the pearl necklace that Abe gave her on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. She was almost angry with him that night, saying it was wasteful, asking if she was the kind of woman who’d wear pearls. Everyone at the table had suppressed a grin. With the pearls around her neck, the shadow Hannah became visible, the debutante who lived in the old hippie. Had she fallen in love with a different kind of man, Hannah would now be hosting Derby parties, getting tipsy on juleps and wondering why the world felt so hollow under her well-gilded knuckles.

Bit tries not to see what he has already seen, that her right leg and arm have atrophied and twisted. The left arm is going that way, also. There is a strange gray tone to her skin.

Hannah hides her face in the bubbles. Grete builds devil horns on her head. And Bit takes the warm washcloth and slides it along his mother’s body to scrub away the stink of her mourning. When he is cleaning her feet, Hannah lifts her face and it is featureless as an Amish doll under the scrim of soap. Grete gently clears her eyes and mouth of the suds. Bad girl, she leaves the horns.

Clean, now, Hannah is at the table. Her hair is dried and braided, and she is in an ancient sweatsuit so soft it felt like her own skin when Bit put it on her. She manages an avocado–soy cheese melt and some chai. Bit puts on an old record, and while Joan Baez warbles through the house, Grete escapes for another run in the dusk. When her footsteps have gone, Hannah turns on Bit. This is cruel, she says. Her tongue is thick in her mouth, her muscles spasming in her chin. She says, Selfish of you to make me go through this.

Selfish, he repeats, very softly. A daddy longlegs skirts the edge of sun on the linoleum.

When he responds, much later, it is toward the kitchen window. The world held in a frame calms him: the sparrows darting over the green fields, the last flush of Arcadia House through the maple trunks. That small square is all he can take, just now.

When I was little, he says. When you’d grow sad and tired and sleep all the time in the winter, I used to watch you just lying there. In the summer, you were so loud and golden and happy, and suddenly one day you’d just go away. You’d become this pale changeling in place of my mother. It was so cold in the Bread Truck. Unless Abe came home early, I didn’t eat anything from breakfast to dinner. Sometimes I tried to kiss you out of it, but I never was enough, I could never get you to wake up. Deep down, I was sure it was my fault.

It wasn’t your fault, she snaps. And it wasn’t my fault, if you’re trying to say that
I
was being selfish. It was brain chemistry. You of all people know this, Bit.

He looks at her. Her jaw is set: she is fighting hard. In the window, the world is blue.

All those times, you took yourself away, he says. All I wanted was for you to come back.

He watches her try to pick the crumbs from the table with the fleshy pad of her palm. She gives up, and her hand curls beside the porcelain.

But I did, she says. Come back. This time too. You weren’t there, you didn’t see it. There was a sea. It was very warm. I was holding Abe. Then the waves worked their way in between us and he drifted out. I tried to swim for him, but he was gone. I came back.

They hear Grete on the porch, stomping the mud from her running shoes. She is singing something in the off-pitch voice Helle gave her. In the dim at the kitchen table, Bit and Hannah both wince.

I’m too tired, Hannah says, under her breath. I’m too tired, Bit.

If not for me, Bit says quick and low, for Grete.

His daughter is a silhouette in the screen. Hannah reaches out and touches Bit’s cheek with her good hand. Grete runs in. She drops onto Hannah’s plate what Bit sees is a handful of wild narcissus, ripped from the ground, bulbs and all. Grannah, she shouts, her cheeks pink with delight. Flowers! In February!

Hannah smiles. It is a dry, unconvincing smile, but she takes a tiny pale bloom from the clump and puts it on the back of Bit’s hand. For you, she says. Then Hannah asks Grete about her day and Grete’s face lights up lovely under her grandmother’s attention, and Bit leaves the flower where it is until his hand jerks in revolt.

They take walks. Twice a day, they go out, and Hannah stumbles against Bit; at first, she can only make it to Midge’s before she collapses into the weather-beaten lawn chair in front of the cave-house. She peers at her feet and says, Come on, you old clodhoppers, and heaves herself up and painfully presses on. She insists on showering alone. She dresses herself; it takes an hour. She swallows her antidepressants, pain relievers, laxatives, one by one, choking them down with a look of dour satisfaction. She goes to the bathroom; it takes a half an hour, and she comes out trailing toilet paper on her shoe. Fierce, now, she is grabbing what she can to her. Soon enough, you’ll help, she tells Bit. Soon enough.