Out of the Blue (7 page)

Joe started a slow smile, but he still didn’t exactly get it. “So for the past five years,” I explained, “whenever I’ve been anxious or overly stressed, I could close my eyes and imagine a pale moon against a velvet sky and say the word in my mind. Moon. Slowly. M-o-o-o-o-n.”

Now he was grinning.

“But ever since we went for our skinny dip on your rooftop, I can’t think
moon
without conjuring up your butt, which is not designed to slow my heartbeat. I swear, I am not kidding. It’s a serious problem.”

He was laughing again. I hoped I’d distracted him from the litany of aches and pains.

“So now you have to help me find another word,” I said. “Any suggestions?”

He thought a minute. “Breasts.”

“Oh, that’s a big help.”

“They’re beautiful, your breasts.”

“Somehow we got off the track here,” I murmured. “What about
om
? A lot of people swear by it.”

But he had swerved over into the right-hand lane. He pulled straight off onto the grassy shoulder and stopped the car.

“What? What?” I thought maybe we had a flat tire.

“Emergency,” he said, popped his seat belt and leaned over to kiss me. It was a long exploration. Here was a man who liked kissing. So many don’t. All they’re interested in is kicking the ball between the goal posts, so to speak.

I was practically panting when he released me. His eyes were scanning the woods, and I could see a golf course through the trees.

“Oh, no,” I said. “We’re not getting naked and having sex on the fourteenth hole. Do you think I’m completely shameless?”

He gave me a tender smile and didn’t answer.

“All right. I am. I know I am. Please, Joe, let’s get back on the road and roll down all the windows. I need to cool off.” Heat is not good for me. Any minute now, my legs would start acting like I’d just entered the Adirondack log-roll competition.

We drove along in delicious frustration. After a while, he pulled off at a bona fide exit that said
STOCKBRIDGE FALLS STATE PARK
. You look back on things later and wonder how come there wasn’t a sign, some warning of impending doom. But there was only Joe whistling something upbeat and jazzy. I’m too tone deaf to recognize a song without the lyrics to clue me in.

We parked in a lot that was surprisingly empty on such a crystalline day. “Everybody must be home working on their Halloween costumes,” I said.

Joe reached into the backseat for his camera bag, then came around my side to help me out. I was pretty much dead weight after the long drive, and as soon as he had me out of the car, he started kissing me again. I’m tempted to blame all that kissing for my mishap, but I need to resist such puritanical rationalizations.

We only had to walk about a hundred yards along a wooded path before he stopped and pointed. Across the meadow, it appeared as if an entire section of the earth had suddenly shot up twenty stories, exposing the expanse of rock that I recognized from a photograph in his apartment. It loomed like a sublime sculpture, sheer and black above the soft maze of the autumn landscape.

“Wow,” I said.

“The light in this place can fry your brain.” Joe began twisting a lens onto his camera. “Can you walk over there with me, or do you want to wait here?”

The ground was level enough and it felt good to move a little. We were soon at the bottom of the cliff and I could see the natural trail that zigzagged up the face. I thought the view must be pretty staggering from up there. I said to Joe, “Have you ever climbed it?”

But he took me by the shoulders, too single-minded to answer or probably even hear me. “Stand right here,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking your photograph.”

“I thought you don’t do people.” The moment I said it, I remembered the back flap of Lola’s book. I thought I might bring it up but I could see that Joe was totally absorbed. His camera was clicking, clicking, and he kept changing my position. I liked having his hands on me and gave myself over to playing Georgia O’Keeffe to his Stieglitz. Finally, he had me sit and lean against the rocks, holding my knees. The way his eyes assessed me as part of the visual field felt both impersonal and extremely intimate. He reached over to arrange my hair against my shoulders.

“I wish I could somehow reveal it, the softness,” he said, more to himself than to me. “I guess it’s too cold for you to take off your clothes.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I’d like to photograph you naked against the rock.”

“Oh, fine,” I said. “Goose bumps should make an interesting texture.” But he wasn’t paying any attention and was already half kneeling to get the shot. Lola had looked so sickeningly healthy in
her
photo, all those white teeth and that blond hair blowing in the wind. It was a familiar little twisting sensation, jealousy. I couldn’t see why the MS lesions didn’t toast
that
ugly section of my brain instead of the part that kept me setting one foot down in front of the other. There’s no justice.

“Did you ever climb up to the top?” I asked Joe again as he changed the film.

“Yes,” he said absently.

I wondered if Lola had been with him. “It must be very beautiful,” I said.

“Incredible.”

“I’d like to do it.”

He looked up.

“It doesn’t seem that steep.”

His dubious expression only spurred me. “No, it’s okay. I’m not completely helpless, you know.” I scrambled to my feet. “Come on. I’ll race you to the top.”

“Are you sure, Anna? I don’t think—”

“It’ll be good for me,” I said. “I need to.”

As he zipped his camera into its case, I remember thinking, Okay, Anna, there’s still time to get yourself out of this. Don’t be such a complete ass. But then I thought about how fit I used to be. Seven years ago, I’d gone hiking in the Sierra Nevadas with thirty pounds on my back. Those mountains made this sucker look like a road bump.

The path was well-worn and smooth at first. I suppose a lot of would-be climbers had set off with brave intentions. But soon there was a rise in the terrain and it got dramatically narrower. The footing deteriorated into loose rock and I started having trouble keeping my balance. I was also getting too warm, an almost certain recipe for leg spasms. One would think that a mature woman like myself would at this point have said, “Okay, the view’s great but it’s time to go down.”

Joe was right behind me. “Are you okay with this, Anna? It’s pretty rough.” Something about the concern in his voice just made it seem impossible to stop. I was too breathless to respond so I just waved my hand at him.

I suppose I was lucky I didn’t get much farther before meeting my comeuppance. As it was, I made it maybe a hundred feet up and my left leg just went out of control. It jerked off to the side in a grotesque kick and I went down hard. I remember hearing a slide of pebbles falling away beneath me as I hit, and I wondered if I was destined to be the spearhead of a spectacular avalanche. Then I guess there was a hiatus because I woke up with a man leaning over me. He looked scared and angry.

“Sorry, Dad,” I murmured. “The alien made me do it.”

“I should never have let you come up here,” the man said. “You’ve cut yourself.”

“But you can make it all better.” I could always count on Dad. He was my hero. Never let me down in the crunch. Besides, I couldn’t feel a thing. Not anywhere. That happens now and then, as if somebody slipped me a spinal. I put my hand up to my head and there was sticky stuff on my cheek and neck. “Oops,” I said.

“We’d better get you to a hospital.”

“Drat,” I said, and started to giggle. I’d had this sudden image of myself as Icarus’s sister, lying in a heap with my wings squished. “‘Drat’ is short for ‘dratophopoulous,’” I explained to Dad. “From the Greek.” I don’t know why it struck me funny, but I’d hit my head pretty hard. The world went out of focus for a moment, and when it sharpened again, Joe was helping me sit up. My father was gone, no surprise there.

“Oh. Joe. God. You must be really pissed.” I got no argument. Suddenly the paralysis passed and both legs began trembling badly.

“What happened to your sneaker?” Joe asked. The laces must have loosened, and then the spasms shook it off. Joe found it nearby and put it on my foot. Not simple, since it was now uncooperatively slack and appeared to have been screwed on sideways. Clearly, there was no way I could walk.

Joe reached under me and lifted me in his arms. It was a grueling trip down, what with the loose rocks underfoot and my intermittent spasms. Blood from my face spread across the front of Joe’s shirt. Neither of us spoke. I nominated myself as the world’s biggest fool, and no doubt every straining muscle in Joe’s body was seconding the motion.

Getting me into the car was no easy trick either. Since my left leg refused to bend at all by now, Joe finally had to install me in the backseat where I could stretch out.

“I’m sorry, Joe,” I said, putting it mildly.

He didn’t answer, just slid behind the wheel, tires screeching as we pulled out fast. “You didn’t know the terrain,” he said. But he was mad. I could see it in the set of his jaw, and those eyes could get steely.

The whole lower left side of my face had begun to throb, and it hurt to talk. Joe asked the ranger in the toll booth for directions to the nearest hospital. It was supposedly a quarter hour drive, but I’d say we made it in five.

The Stockbridge Falls Medical Center was a motellike structure with a single vintage ambulance parked at the emergency entrance. It was beginning to strike me that I could be in serious trouble here. Joe somehow got me out of the car and through the door. I was feeling quite woozy but I remember noting that the receptionist was interestingly nonurban—a young woman with elaborately waved bangs over hair straight to the shoulders. That hairstyle always seemed the great divider between city and country folk in America. You see it on talk shows, the women in the audience, and it’s one of the ways you identify tourists on Manhattan streets.

“You’ll have to wait. The doctor’s busy.”

It turned out that the only other patient was a little boy who’d gotten his Halloween costume stuck in his bicycle spokes and gone for a header. He had gravel burns on his hands and a split lip. While he was being attended to, they put me on a bed in a cubicle and drew the curtain. Joe slumped down in a plastic chair. It was difficult to imagine that I looked bloodier or dirtier than he did. The bed was drifting. I felt that I was awash on a sea of sins, most prevalent among them Pride and Envy. Perhaps I would drown. But I was not entitled to self-pity. Joe reached out to take my hand. It hurt like everything else, but was comforting all the same.

“Joe,” I said. “I screwed up. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t know what was up there.” It wasn’t just anger in his face. Fear etched shadows in the hollows under his eyes. “I shouldn’t have let you.”

“
Let
me. I’m supposed to be a grown-up—” I made the mistake of shaking my head. Nausea clutched the back of my throat. I had no idea how badly I’d been hurt, and was determined to get this out before I fainted or maybe died. Joe must not be permitted to accept any responsibility here. The issue had to do with our future together, if there was to be one.

“Listen to my mind here,” I began. But I was so dizzy it was a challenge to hang on to my thoughts. I was also in serious danger of vomiting and still had enough vanity left to hope I could avoid such a display. Joe gave me one of those looks people bestow on the delusional and went to demand the doctor. I could hear voices mingling in the distance, far far away:

“Where the fuck … multiple sclerosis … kind of a second-rate hospital… why didn’t you say …”

I think they took an X ray. Then I dozed a little, and when I woke up, Joe was standing beside a woman with a stethoscope hanging around her neck.

“I’m Dr. Kratz,” she said. “You don’t have a concussion but we’re going to have to close that gash.”

“I have to reach my doctor,” I said. “I’ve got MS.”

“Your friend here already tried but he’s not available.”

I didn’t remember giving Joe his number. “He’s always. Reached,” I said past the glue ball in my throat.

“His service says he’s at a Halloween party for his little girl,” Joe said.

“Oh, how
sweet
!” It made me want to cry.

“You need stitches,” Dr. Kratz said, “and you need them right away.”

“Are you a plastic surgeon?”

Dr. Kratz didn’t like that at all, I could see. She gave Joe a look that implied they were in this thing together, the campaign to make me act reasonable. But I was imagining a Frankenstein-like scar slicing across my cheek with pegs holding it all together.

“The wound is just under your jawline,” the doctor explained. I didn’t remember her examining me, but then, I’d been fading in and out. “I did my residency at Bellevue and I’m fully equipped to stitch you up good as new.” She flashed me an insincere smile, but it served its purpose because I could see she’d had her teeth capped, expensively and expertly. Furthermore, I could tell that she was deft with makeup. Appearances counted with Dr. Kratz, I figured. So maybe she’d forgo the pegs.

“Okay,” I said. “But no Xylocaine.”

“Of course you’ll get Xylocaine,” she said. “And an antibiotic and a tetanus shot.”

I shook my head again, forgetting what a rotten idea it was. I felt the pain roll my eyes back in my head. Dr. Kratz looked up at Joe and moved her mouth. I couldn’t hear the words, but the expression on her face was eloquent enough.
This broad is a pain in the butt and what are you delicious man doing with such a pitiful specimen and can’t you talk some sense into her?

I snapped back to attention. In fact, I actually sat up halfway. By some miracle, my giant swollen head which was now the size of Utah did not roll off its pitiful stalk of a neck. I summoned my most authoritative voice, the one I always used when all hell broke out in homeroom the morning before Christmas vacation.

“Listen up,” I said. “I’m not letting anybody near me with painkillers or anything that numbs. You want to give me an antibiotic, that’s fine. And tetanus is okay, too, but that’s it. And if it’s all right with you, I’d just as soon get cracking. I’m not about to miss trick-or-treat.”