Driftless (42 page)

There was also room for a thousand colors of concern. Was this something real? What prevented the possibility that some chemical-hormonal eruption had misfired in his limbic system and because of this synaptic accident his reason had seen reason to crown Winnie as the cause?

He needed a hard science to determine if this new way of perceiving Winnie in some way involved the actual Winifred Smith or had strayed like a rudderless ship out of the Feigning Ocean.

How could he know? Real love did not live in a single home; either it lived in two places at once or it did not live at all. It could be neither confirmed nor denied in isolation. Only the object of his new longing could inform him. Self-reflection seemed useless.

He glanced at the clock and didn’t care that it was late.

If he heard her voice, he would know—for sure.

He tore through the telephone book.

Smith, Winifred, Rev.

Then he didn’t want to dial. This new feeling was the best thing that had visited him in a long, long time, and even if it was wholly imagined, he feared losing it. He did not want to return to the person he was before the feeling arrived.

Yet he also did not wish to be deluded.

He dialed the number and engaged distant ringing. Five, six, seven . . .

“Hello, this is Pastor Winifred.” (Muffled, slurred, sleepy.)

“Hello?” (Slurred, sleepy.)

“Hello?” (Sleepy.)

“Hello.”

The tiny sound of her voice coming out of the half-inch speaker into his right ear was so assuredly attached to the actual tongue and lips of the speaker on the other end that it beckoned for him to crawl into the telephone line after it. He couldn’t think of anything to say and listened until she hung up.

The gavel had struck. It
was
real. The shapeless spirit had been found alive in the world, embodied.

Jacob hung up the phone and immediately wanted to call her back, apologize for waking her, confess his insensitivity, beg her to forgive him, and explain everything that had happened to him in the last half hour. But that seemed like a crazy idea and instead he devoted himself to full-time worry.

He hardly knew her. Any number of things might be wrong with the way he kept imagining the two of them together.

Yet his level of deepest impulse had been engaged. Her voice had reached into him and thrown the switch. He had to see her again, and whatever happened would happen. His compulsion to match his idea of her to her physical presence—to revel in unique particulars, incarnate the mental shape in which she lived inside him, find her soul and contemplate it, speak to it, even touch it—acknowledged no hindrances. His fearful, yearning joy was even more pronounced because he well knew this newly found treasure’s terrible worth. He had stood on the bottom rung of this ladder before and understood the implications of climbing higher.

Somewhere, a bargain had been sealed. For the frail chance of knowing her completely, he had recklessly wagered an eternity of need.

He felt alive, important, filled with purpose, his capacity for both suffering and pleasure growing exponentially.

As if to arrest his ambition, Jacob pulled the picture off the wall. But since he had last looked, the photographic image had changed. Instead of holding him in her vise of nostalgia, his wife standing in a garden in white shorts six years ago seemed to wish him a speedy departure. Her smile knew that another, more desperate absence had replaced hers and she seemed well satisfied with her new circumstances, glad to be rid of him.

Even with the picture in his hands, Jacob could still perfectly recollect Winnie sitting like a folded- up butterfly on the edge of a leaf. Her feet pressed together, her back not making contact with the chair, her eyes closed, her lips moving, the scent of something between almonds and lilacs trapped in her long hair. When she opened her dark eyes he could see his own thoughts flashing through them.

He was beside himself and could no longer be contained within
the prison of his own house. An inexplicable largeness had entered his life.

Fifteen minutes later, he arrived at the farm of July Montgomery, parked his jeep in the front yard, and banged on the door. When it opened he rushed inside. “I’ve got to talk to you. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t think this could or would ever happen. You have to help me.”

KEEPING IN ONE’S PLACE

A
S OLIVIA WAITED FOR HER SISTER TO RETURN FROM HER WALK with the dog, she became less excited about discovering a healthy connection between her brain and her right foot. She had been trained by experience to be cautious in assessing the possibility that she might find release from her disease. How many times in the past had she and others been encouraged to hope that her condition would improve? Disappointments had followed discouragements like a caravan of lame, dusty mules.

Never again, she resolved. I’ve been tricked by hope before.

She would keep quiet until she had something trustworthy to report.

So when Violet returned with the dog and a bread bag filled with watercress, Olivia said nothing. Nor did she speak when for the first time she was able to move her other foot—even when she began to feel the kind of pain in her lower back, hips, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, and feet that any person might feel after years of atrophy.

Instead she complained, truthfully enough, of diarrhea, and Violet took her to the Grange Clinic, where in the privacy of the examination room she moved her feet for the doctor.

Dr. Fleckmann, an aging general practitioner, arranged for a week of tests, at the end of which two specialists from Madison with half the alphabet marching after the names on their shirt pins explained to Olivia that she had been misdiagnosed in earlier years. The symptoms commonly associated with multiple sclerosis had instead issued from an undetected spirochetal bacterium. Prolonged doses of oxytetracycline, the primary antibiotic in the coffee tin, had been effective in beginning to counteract it. They recommended a more narrowly prescribed medication with fewer gastrointestinal side effects and returned her to the care of Dr. Fleckmann.

Still suspicious of her long-term prospects, Olivia withheld this news from her sister.

But she was anxious to tell someone about the wild possibility of not being perpetually incapacitated, and Wade Armbuster eagerly agreed to protect her secret and assist in strengthening her neglected muscles. Every weekday after work at the cheese plant, he drove Olivia to a deserted county park, and in a secluded glen surrounded by hawthorn and quaking aspen she began the arduous task of re-learning how to stand, balance, and walk.

Her rehabilitation was greatly assisted by the exercise of her iron will. Previously confined to the playground of her home personality, Olivia took an almost sadistic delight in forcing her body to comply with her wishes. Fueled by the unholy anger of nearly a lifetime of needless invalidism, she fought to recover her wholeness. She interpreted pain through its secondary attributes and viewed fatigue as an illusion to be overcome. She tasted her own blood, relished the flavor, and improved quickly.

Unfortunately, her physical advancement was so unconscionably rapid that it outpaced her ability to adjust to it. Her thoughts could not keep up. First, there was the anger, and from that cup she drank deeply and frequently. For years she had been imprisoned in beds, chairs, utilitarian clothes, and ugly, oversized shoes, when all she really needed was a common medicine that could be purchased by the pound. All those interminable hours of staring at ceilings and walls, longing for health!

How she hated those memories.

She had been robbed of her youth. And though she might succeed now in winning something back—some last, fleeting taste of normalcy before creaking middle age and eventually imbecility captured her—still nothing could ever save her youth, which, unredeemed, hung about her neck like a murdered child.

Her spoiled past was a terrible thing to contemplate, yet she felt compelled to stare into this fetid heritage as though to find salvation in revulsion.

She felt as if she had spent most of her life imprisoned in a cold cellar only to learn that the cellar door had never been locked. Now,
standing in the outside stairwell, she wondered how she could ever walk fully into the bright front yard after her grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, uncles, and aunts had all died waiting for her to come out. Their absence was more palpable than any presence, and it often seemed better to return to the cellar.

To be healed without their gathered approval seemed unthinkable.

There were so many people to hate, beginning with the doctors. Fiends, warlocks and witches of the black arts! Why hadn’t they
known
what to do?

She thought of all the people she suspected of blaming her—who looked upon her illness as lack of faith and her infirmity as cowardice. How could she endure the memories of those smug faces? Their condemnation had been so convincing she had even come to fear her poor health was somehow justified—not because of anything she had
done
but because of who she
was.
Feeling bad had convicted her of being bad. She had blamed herself for something she had had no more control over than she had over Earth’s orbit.

It was a fucking infection,
Wade said.

At night she dreamed that all the violence of Armageddon had been taped to her body and hidden beneath a yellow raincoat. Just when all of Job’s friends gathered around to examine her suffering, she yanked the cord and sat bolt upright in bed, her fists shaking, holding back a scream loud enough to crystallize blood sugar for miles around.

And there was one person with whom she was most incurably enraged—for whom there could never be forgiveness, someone who should have known better.

Violet.

The tiny, stemless indigo- and white-blossomed flowers were just beginning to grow, spreading like scattered necklaces through the park’s mowed grass, and Olivia was walking on them, crushing them beneath her feet, her muscles and bones growing stronger.

At night, exhausted, she ate meals in enormous proportions, washed down with plastic tumblers of raw milk.

“Land sakes, Olivia, you must have a tapeworm. There’s nothing left over for the dog’s leftovers.”

Olivia’s eyes seethed.

“Here now, if your little outings with Wade are going to make you frown all the time so much, then don’t go. It’s not like you couldn’t find something more useful to do. Yes, Trixie, I’ll be right there. Don’t carry on so. Land sakes, there’s not enough hours in the day’s hours.”

It soon became clear that Olivia had tied a knot she did not know how to undo. Before she was ready for it she had a nearly fully functioning body, yet had said nothing to her sister. She had trapped herself into pretending to be an invalid inside her own home.

The real problem with accepting her new health—the one that kept her lying mute and unmoving while her sister bathed her, dressed her, prepared her meals, washed her clothes, and tucked her into bed—was what she would do about Violet. What would Violet do without her to take care of? Violet needed her to be sick, and she needed to be sick to keep Violet.

Olivia began to fear that Violet, on her own, would discover her secret. She called Dr. Fleckmann to remind him of the confidential nature of doctor-patient relationships and discontinued her afternoon outings with Wade, despite his loud protests. (As her body had grown more functional, his passion for her had increased, and the exercises he devised for her rehabilitation were, well, they were not very helpful.)

She didn’t feel she could live without Violet, yet she was sure Violet would leave the instant she learned of her new wellness. Whatever love Violet felt for her surely had more to do with her being sick than with her being Olivia.

She also began to fear the infection would somehow return and any declaration of health could be shown to be false. So it might be prudent to keep quiet a little longer.

Imprisoned in her psychological jail—a fort that had locked out its own soldiers—Olivia had never been so unhappy. There were no longer any safe thoughts, only anger and anger’s silent partner, fear. Each night she struggled with these two, weaving them into a fabric that would allow her to walk away from them, and each morning she unraveled the work and set them free.

One night in early June as Violet slept in her bedroom at the end of the hall, Olivia could not suppress a desire to explore the upstairs.

As Violet breathed heavily, Olivia silently rolled through the living room and parked the wheelchair at the bottom of the steep staircase. Wearing corduroy slippers and a bathrobe, she gripped the sturdy wooden banister and drew herself to her feet.

As she climbed slowly, the creaking of boards proved unexpectedly alarming in the otherwise dark stillness, but these moments were offset by the remembered smell of old varnish, mold, stale air, and her grandparents. Memories ignited with each seven-inch rise in elevation. Ten minutes later, standing firmly on the second- floor landing, she inhaled deeply and looked down the hall, where moonlight entered the four-paned, south-facing window. She reached for the light, thought better of using it, and let her fingers trace fondly over the shape of the switch, the edges rounded by repeated contact with the fingers of her family.

Following a dubious faith in wood groaning less near walls, Olivia traveled down the hallway, supporting herself when possible by pieces of furniture and door frames. It was an enchanted journey—a reverie in which the thoughts of her ancestors, remnants of their souls, seemed imbedded in the walls like scribbled prayers tucked into the Temple Mount. Reaching the window, she looked into the moonlit yard and was amazed at how the high view rendered the familiar scene foreign.

She then opened the door at the end of the hall slowly and stepped inside her parents’ bedroom, where giant magnolias on the wallpaper greeted her like familial faces from the world beyond. An ocean of loss broke upon the shores of memory and her heart rushed to inform her of its beating. She crept further in and rested her hands on the walnut bed, marveling at its solemn, diminutive size. Now a resting place for old quilts and boxes of craft supplies, the tiny bed seemed extraordinarily incapable of having once held her mother and father, yet the logic of its having done so remained unimpeachable.