I see you everywhere (23 page)

“Don’t stay if you need to get back home,” I say. “I’m not going to be a vegetable.”

She snaps the book shut. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Looking at her in profile, I notice (not meaning to, not out of spite) that her chin is beginning to sag, just barely. The four years between us once seemed like an eon. Now the gap feels uncomfortably slim.

“Sorry, but yes, I have to go back tonight. Sorry I’m so spacey. It’s just . . . a hospital’s not the most festive place to hang out.” As if she’s sensed my scrutiny, she unclips her hair, letting it fall around her face.

“Lou—did you ever talk to Jerry?”

“I spoke to someone named Sheryl and left a message. I’ll try again if you want.”

“At his house? This . . . Sheryl?”

“I called the number you gave me.”

“Did she know me?”

Louisa looks unambivalently irritated now. “She wasn’t extremely friendly. I assumed she would pass on the message. I said it was urgent.”

The neighbor who feeds Coleslaw? I’m leafing through the women I remember in his life.

“So,” Louisa says abruptly, “how many do you have in mothballs?”

“How many what?”

“Men.”

I’m about to ask why she’s picking a fight when suddenly I get it. Her Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 153
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nervous comings and goings? Nausea. Her instinct for combat? Hormones. Now she’s saying—in a kind of hiss, because we have to keep our voices down—“What I can’t believe is this guy Larney—this, in case you hadn’t noticed, outgoing, funny, gorgeous guy—how he doesn’t
mind
about . . . what did he call him? ‘The sperm czar’? Who I assume has got to be this Jerry I’m chasing down. Last I heard, you were still talking to Luke, still on the fence about Zip—whom I liked, you know, despite all his talk about inner power and yin food. . . .”

I wait to be sure she’s wound down. “Last I checked, ‘talking’ and ‘on the fence’ aren’t fucking.”

“Did I say anything about fucking? I don’t care if you’re fucking them all. I’d just love to know how you keep them in tow.”

“Louisa, we’re not all blissfully married like you.” I don’t mean to insult her, but the look on her face tells me plainly that I did. Gwen pokes her head in. “Ten minutes, you two.”

The minute Gwen’s gone, I say, “Lou, are you having a baby?”

I do a lot of reckless things, my mother is right, but I don’t hitchhike (mainly because it’s so boring and inefficient). If I was in fact hitching a ride—close to dark, on a highway—and if I looked heartbroken, angry, or both, I dread to think what it means. Years ago, in the rain, I hitched away from my very last breakup with Luke. He was devastated; I walked out like a guy, like a cad. No one will ever watch me weep from a broken heart. At my worst moments, I wonder if I know what a broken heart is—

or a heart before it’s broken. Maybe broken is all I know. When we were little, I was sick all the time. Not sick in bed or withering away, but I had a lot of violent allergies, as if life were constant provocation, my body itching for a fight. So I got just about all the attention, deserved or not. Anxious, most of it. The anxious devotion of my mother. Which grew, eventually, into proprietary devotion, because I liked the same things she liked: horses, dogs, working up a good sweat. Later, holding the fascination of men. People talk about “matches”

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between parents and children, the luck of the cosmic draw. Mom and I are a pretty good match.

One year at our annual Fourth of July cookout (I was in high school, Louisa in college), Mom was telling a bunch of our neighbors how I’d broken into the town pool. (I was still wearing that tea strainer over my eye.) She’d had a decent amount of gin, and her voice carried across the lawn: “When I answered my front door and saw Officer Graves, his ground-chuck nose on the other side of that screen, I remember thinking, Oh my God, my darling baby, my favorite child—don’t tell me what I can’t bear to hear, you son of a bitch! I would have ripped the man’s tonsils out with my bare hands, believe you me, if the words I feared had come out of his mouth.”

I looked myopically up from wherever I was in the crowd and happened to see Louisa’s face, wherever she was. Completely tuned in to our mother’s words, she was staring me down, the look on her face triumphantly sour. She’d always said I was our mother’s favorite, and I would deny what I knew to be true, because until then she never had proof.
Here
it is at last,
said her look, what she’d been waiting for: justification she could bank against any future family injustice. Funny, though, how then we were free to be friends—carefully, but still. It was like the end of a game of musical chairs: over, all that wondering who’d get the seat; win or lose, the same relief.

Louisa’s still angry, but I’ve made a dent, because she laughs for about ten seconds. “Oh, I am anything but having a baby.”

“Well you are
something.
I don’t know what, but something.”

She hides her face again. “Something. Yes, I am something.”

I wait. “Well?”

“Clem, can I ask you a question?” She looks serious. “Do our lives, I mean ours in particular, revolve around men?”

“Pardon my intrusion.”

Louisa and I look over, startled. It’s Dr. A. “I had meant to observe the Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 155
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back of your head, Miss Jardine. Then I will entrust you again to your sister.”

As he snips gently at the bandage, he asks me random questions. His smell is so overwhelming, so lovely, that it takes me nearly a minute to recall how many playing cards there are in a deck, sides to a stop sign, states in the Union. His fingers touch my bare scalp. I tell him Tangier is a city or maybe a country, tangelo a fruit, tangent a geometric divergence. When he leaves, I say to Louisa, “What does that man smell like? It’s beautiful.”

“That’s vetiver,” says Louisa. “It’s nice, you’re right.”

Gwen pulls back my curtain. She taps her watch. “Time, girls.”

Larney’s roses await me. They are nicer than I thought—pungent and meaty, flowers of pedigree and substance. The card reads,
With profound
apologies & unswervingly tropical affections, Yours and yours only, L.
At the top, a deft slash through j. larned quincy poole, indigo on ivory. Thanks to Dr. Slocum, I have a private room at dormitory cost. After two sessions of dramatic pleading, the day nurse finally agreed to turn off the fluorescent light that runs like a racing stripe around the upper walls. So the light in my room is now sun, which swells and fades as the clouds come and go, the way a pupil widens and constricts. In a week, it’s the closest I’ve come to open air, which I desperately crave. I nap erratically, black holes of dreamless sleep that quench like rationed swigs of cold spring water. Each time I wake, my head aches with the labor of healing. Dad is my first visitor here, exhausted from hurricane vigil. For half of every summer, hurricanes are to my father what national economists are to CEOs: whispering
Disaster, disaster
right in your ear, then half the time saying
No, sorry, just joshing!

It’s the first time I’ve seen him since coming to, but Dr. Slocum tells me he was here on the second day of my delirium. Between tests, he sat by my gurney while Mom paced and cursed and bargained with my absent self. Now he carries a rose—a Mrs. Anthony Waterer—red as a Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 156 156

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cherry sno-cone. He loves reciting the names of his roses, most of them Baroness This, Comtesse That, Principessa Hooha. He carries my rose in a mason jar with a punctured lid, which he will have packed in a picnic cooler to keep it fresh for the two-hour drive.

It’s Dad who tells me exactly what happened, and the story seems to give a purpose to his presence that makes him less uncomfortable in mine.

The uncle had a crew member cancel before an important race, and Larney recruited me. Entering the last leg, a strong wind at our stern, we were neck and neck with another boat to port. When their bow began to veer toward ours, the skipper panicked: He tacked before us when we had the right of way. I was on the foredeck, raising the spinnaker, which unfurled against my face and snapped in the wind like gunfire, leaving me blind and deaf to all warnings. When the two boats collided and our bow rode up over theirs, I was smacked in the chest by their boom and hurled backward into the water. As I went in, the jib sheet snared my right arm, snapping the ulna; then my head slammed against the side of our boat. Larney dove in and passed me up to the other crew members. Somebody radioed for an ambulance. The paramedics, en route to the nearest ER, called in the medevac from Boston.

Though Dad inhabits the sailing world and lives a life many would kill for, in his dreams he’s just the plantsman he was schooled to be, pruning vines, cataloging spores, protecting fragile blooms from extinction. This old longing gives him a professorial tone when he tells tales, not the blow-me-down air of your average nautical windbag. As I eat my dinner, he reenacts methodically the way in which his youngest daughter almost died.

“But here you are, safe,” he says at last. His tone is so reverent, it makes me nervous.

“After a fashion!” I say, to lighten him up, but he doesn’t smile.

“I would like to impress upon you that your mother and I were terrified. Please realize, this is the third time our town police chief has materialized at our front door on your behalf. Clem, honey, it is my sincerest, most heartfelt wish that this time will have been the last. The very Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 157
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arrival of this man’s car in our driveway again would do us in.” He’s still holding on to his flower, as if he’s not sure I deserve it. Condensation from the jar drips onto the floor and one of his boat moccasins (a new pair).

“Dad, it’s my wish, too,” I say, but I have to suppress the urge to giggle at his solemnity. Apology is no more my style than gushing about grief, love, and mortality is his.

He kisses me on the cheek and sets Mrs. Waterer beside Larney’s bouquet. He stops to finger one of the pink blooms, now fully open. “
Sou-
venir d’un ami.
Your young man is not undiscerning.”

Before leaving, he reaches inside his jacket. “This looks important,”

he says. The envelope is addressed to me at Jerry’s, forwarded in his scrawl to Rhode Island, and I wonder if Dad saw the irony: his daughter bashed up in an ICU while there’s her name,
Clement Jardine,
typed on a clean white surface, placid as a stormless sea,
c/o Mr. Beau Jardine,
in whose care she has not been for some time. I’ll bet it made him feel awful, that
c/o.
It makes me want to say something reassuring, but I fail again, because he is out the door, with a taut wave, before I can think of a thing. The return address is Jackson, Wyoming, and the letter inside—from someone whose name means nothing to me, Department of Game and Fish—tells me that he and his colleagues were “more than impressed”

by our meeting and hope I will, taking into account the funding constraints we discussed, accept a position as research biologist on the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team and move myself out west by September. I concentrate hard, but no bells go off, no boards light up, no fireworks fill that dense black sky. I have flown across the country, seen a place I’ve always yearned to see, landed myself an impressive if poorly paid job, and right now I can’t remember a bit of it. I am not going to tell this to Dr. A. I can only hope dependable Larney will tell me about the sights I saw and, if I told him enough, about the people I more than impressed.

The sky matches Larney’s roses when the nurse shows up to take my tray. I tell her not to turn on the lights just yet. Jerry answers the phone, like he always does, “Heya.”

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“Hey yourself.” My fingers burn on the receiver, as if I’ve just come inside from a bitter cold day. I trample right over the pause: “Just us lately comatose invalids here, don’t mind us.” I stare at my laid-up wrist, at the bruise seeping from under the cast. I apply what I know about healing to its spectrum of yellows and blues.

“I heard you’re in the hospital. I’m sorry.” This is the voice I’ve heard, deep and careful, when he’s talking with difficult but wealthy clients.

“ ‘Sorry.’ Ah.” I look up; my room is nearly dark. When I switch on the reading lamp beside the bed, I switch on my reflection in the window. I’m a mess, except for the ivory satin pajamas that Larney brought when they let me out of purgatory. “Listen, Jerry, just tell me this. Back in, oh, late June, why would I have been hitchhiking outside Boston, madder than Croesus?”

He laughs briefly. “I think it’s ‘richer.’ ”

“What’s richer?”

“Never mind.” He says gently, almost playfully, “Are you drinking?”

“Jerry, I have amnesia. I’m in the hospital. Cocktails are not one of the amenities offered. So help me out here. The last thing I know, I’m maybe moving in with you. Then it’s five weeks later, I’m at death’s door in the ICU, and you are nowhere in sight.”

“ICU . . . my God, the ICU—”

“As in, I see you dumped me when I wasn’t looking. Yes?”

“Bad timing, Clem. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

“Bad timing?”

“Your forgetting, I mean. This is . . .” He sighs loudly. “What a mess.”

My reflection grows more and more insistent. A winking jet soars through my bedridden self.

“Would it be a good idea or not for me to come right out and beg you to tell me what happened? Did I make too big an ass of myself ? Or do I just pretend, oh well, oops, a chapter got ripped from my book.”

I get a second laugh from Jerry, still far from warm, but he tells me. Because he wants us to be friends. I glare at my reflection: Cold day in hell.