Angels Unawares Page 2

Day Two

  Laura woke restless at dawn. She couldn’t trace the source of her agitation. She recalled no nightmare or unsettling dream, and felt as if she’d slept soundly the entire night. Yet here she was wide awake on her back in the diffuse gray light of dawn with hours left before Josh was scheduled to wake and now what was she to do? She had no book to read (though there were hundreds, if not thousands, on the shelves surrounding her in their ponderous grayness now, she couldn’t imagine taking one up and trying to wade through it). There was no T.V. in the room, not that she would’ve turned it on anyway for fear of waking Josh. She considered briefly letting her fingers wander her body to seek those concentrations of nerve endings that might lead her first to distraction and eventually to ease. She’d not availed herself of those solitary pleasures for months at least, maybe years. She wondered if it was proximity to Josh that pushed her mind to consider such things.

  This was a new place she now occupied—the bed, yes, the room, the house; larger still, the duty she’d accepted, the voids and regrets it’d begun to expose. From whence shall my help appear? A yawning hole opened in the center of her being and she saw herself standing at the edge of that hole gazing calmly into its unfathomable darkness. What other perils lay in there? she wondered. Or worse, what nothing? And still further into the depths, what if nothing? What then? That was a prospect she could hardly contemplate. That was a place she couldn’t go. That was a place she wouldn’t go. Her mind released her fingers to their explorations. Her fingers might find some semblance of ease, or life at least, on the thin edge of the darkness, hidden on the fringe. Her body all but leapt at the chance.

  But before her fingers had barely begun, she sat up suddenly in the bed, threw her arm out to grasp the headboard and steady herself against a wave of dizziness. The room had brightened by several shades (or her eyes had adjusted to the dim light), and she could see well enough to walk without turning on the lamp. She swung her legs over the bedside, slid into her slippers and robe, and walked gingerly to the doorway.

  She could make out Josh’s figure on the bed. He was on his back, the shape of his body barely visible beneath the covers. His head was deeply cushioned in the pillow, his face pointed straight toward the ceiling. That’s how he’ll look when he’s dead, she thought; then forced the image from her mind as it threatened to expose again the chasm she was fleeing. She took two cautious steps toward him, intent on laying her ear against his chest or her wrist close by his mouth to confirm his breathing. Don’t be dead yet, she thought or whispered or said aloud. Not yet.

  Then Josh said something—“no” or “woe” or “go,” she couldn’t be sure. She froze in mid-stride, still more than an arm’s length from his side. Had she imagined the sound? She strained to hear. Out of the grayness came the sound of slow, perhaps slightly labored breathing. Imagined word or real, his breathing was concrete proof of life. She need move no closer, disturb him from whatever peace he might be gleaning.

  But what about her? What about her peace, or lack thereof? Could she lie beside him now and pull from his prone body some semblance of the rest he now enjoyed. She tried to remember when she last lay beside him and couldn’t, or wouldn’t. So she tried to imagine lying beside him now. His skin would be cool, his metabolism slowed by the narcotics. His near leg beside hers would suddenly cease at the bulging bandage, while hers would continue on, deeper into the covers, perhaps touching the footboard. She might find his hand beneath the covers, count his fingers, raise them to her lips. By then he’d be awake surely, turn his face to hers. His eyes—dark circles in the dim light—would be clouded by sleep, or maybe tinged with confusion or surprise. But soon enough they would lock on her steady gaze and then calm. And he would find buried in himself the means to quell these new fears and quench this surprise longing. This longing. This longing.

  Laura shuddered hard where she stood. She felt suddenly ill and lurched toward the bathroom, striving to maintain silence while striving not to throw up in the middle of Josh’s bedroom.

  She remembered enough of the layout of the bathroom (or was it instinct, not memory, now, guiding all her movements in the gray dark) to push the door shut behind her and find her way groping to the toilet, where she half-knelt, half-collapsed beside the cool porcelain bowl. She raised the cover and the seat and vomited the part of last night’s dinner that remained in her stomach. She heaved several more times but nothing more came up except sour air. There was a brief pause, then twice more she started to wretch only to have the convulsions suddenly stop in mid-contraction, jerking her whole body into a gastronomical skid that was more painful than if the regurgitation had completed its arc and released its poison. Then it was over.

  She woke sometime later with her head cradled on her left arm, and her left arm resting on the rim of the toilet. She couldn’t see anything in the windowless bathroom. Was it morning yet? How could she know? The powerful smell of her vomit enveloped and nearly overwhelmed her. Her free hand found the handle to the toilet and pushed down. The toilet roared to life in her left ear still resting on her arm on the rim. The roar sounded like a mini-hurricane; and the smell was briefly much worse, then slowly better. She wondered what she’d just flushed away, wondered now too late if she should’ve turned on the light and examined her vomit for signs of blood, mucous, pieces of tissue. Maybe she should’ve saved a sample, taken it to the doctor (which doctor? where?) for lab tests. What was wrong with her anyway?

  But she was too weak to care for long. She couldn’t even lift her head from her arm, couldn’t imagine rising to turn on the light. So she let her other arm fall on the opposite side of the toilet rim; its edge, unwarmed by her flesh, was shockingly cold. Then she thought—I hope Josh’s housekeeper is as thorough as he says she is. The she remembered what her college roommates called their toilet bowl—the porcelain wishing well. She managed a weak smile in the dark. She’d have to come up with a darned good wish, having purchased it at so steep a cost.

  The wish unfolded like this as Laura drifted through layers of semi-consciousness toward a deeper layer of restless sleep. It was the last time she’d thrown up—in the damp and grungy hall toilet shared by twelve other girls in the Paris youth hostel. Though her legs were weak, she’d not let herself collapse in front of the toilet; instead, she grasped her knees and bent over the stained bowl as her stomach rid itself of that morning’s breakfast of cornflakes and sliced banana. She was startled by a loud knock on the door followed by Marge's voice telling her to hurry up. Laura managed to croak out a plea for a few more minutes. Marge mumbled something about her hogging the toilet, then her footsteps on the wooden floor faded as she walked away.

  This was the fourth morning in the last five that Laura’d lost her breakfast, and she knew what it meant. The French had not yet approved an over-the-counter pregnancy test; but her missed period, her sensitive nipples, and now this morning sickness made her pregnancy a certainty, however much she wished to deny it.

  The odd thing is she’d known of her condition for weeks now. The epiphany had come on the long flight from New York to Paris. She’d fallen asleep while upright in her seat with a plump balding Frenchman inches to her right casting the occasional unabashed lascivious stare in her direction and a tiny Italian grandmother with a wrinkled face and intense watchful eyes and a whiny four-year-old granddaughter to her left. She trusted the watchful grandmother to keep the lecherous Frenchman in line and let herself fall asleep.

  In her dream on the plane she saw Josh not as she’d last seen him—waving stiffly at the gate as she’d boarded the New York-bound flight from Boston, his gaze inscrutable to her (after all these years), neither sad nor hopeful nor loving nor forlorn but distant and reserved, safe—but alone in a snowstorm searching something in the fast-piling snow. He looked and he looked, kicking at the snow, the brush, the swamp hummocks; but whatever he was looking for, he never found it, continued his search in the deepening snow, the fading light.

  She’d woke to Atlan
tic dawn streaming brilliance through the wide-body passenger cabin. She glanced to her right—the Frenchman asleep with his mouth agape and a bit of saliva drying on his chin (who was the watcher now?)—and to her left—the wizened-faced woman offered a curt nod (her guard duty on Laura’s behalf successfully completed) with the granddaughter asleep on her lap. That’s when she knew—she was carrying Josh’s child. That’s how she thought of it at that moment—Josh’s child, his only, not hers in any way. It would be months before she began to think of it as her child. By then, she’d made Josh a distant, safely encapsulated memory—no longer her husband and, more to the point, no longer any part of the child slowly ballooning her belly.

  Josh was in a kind of free fall now, in his drugged unconsciousness. Not that the rapid descent was terrifying or exhilarating or even characterized by a sense of accelerating downward motion—it wasn’t. But with what shred of self-awareness remained within him, buried as it was beneath dense layers of sleep and drugs and fever and pain, Josh sensed that he was rushing past, in headlong flight more than fall, what remained of the world he’d inhabited for fifty-eight years.

  Or that it was rushing past him. That, then, is why he’d not sensed movement. It was the world falling past him, not the other way around—a persistent blur occasionally broken by flashing images from his past—his boyhood dog Lady, the hard face of his Grandmother Earl in her coffin, his dad on the ancient Farmall tractor, his Aunt Lucy rowing toward him out of the sunset. They were all dead. The world kept on rushing by—all he’d known and watched and recorded in locked vaults within his brain cascaded by in a blurred waterfall punctuated by glimpses of long-gone people and objects. Surely that blur would end soon—end at darkness or end at light but please God end at something more substantial than the shambles he’d made of this brief and all-too-fragile life.

  Then the blur terminated—not at darkness nor at light but at Angie, his only child, still alive (far as he knew—please, please still alive!). What was she doing here, at a time like this (outside of time, as it was)? Josh was torn in two directions—a knee-jerk response wished to flee from her and the guilt she always prompted, back into the blur and the waste; but another part of him desired to race toward her and cling to her against the chaos. He found himself leaning in her direction, the choice not his but some other.

  Angie held her hand up, stopped him cold. Her fingers, part his making, were long and graceful.

  So Josh stopped. The free fall stopped, the world rushing past stopped, the fleeting images of once living creatures now dead stopped. There was only Angie, some years older than when he’d last seen her, a beautiful young woman with a depth of wisdom that could only come from suffering. Her stare was intense but neutral, neither beckoning nor forbidding, welcoming nor rejecting. He bore that unwavering gaze for what might have been seconds or centuries, if there was time here.

  “So now what?” he finally got up the courage and strength to ask.

  She slowly lowered her hand but made no movement to close the gap between them. Her manner made it clear she expected him to hold his place as well. “Tell me about the longing,” she said, her voice gentle and familiar, as if asking for help with her homework or a ride to dance class.

  He’d not feign ignorance, not here. “It began before I began.”

  “That’s convenient.” There was no hint of sarcasm in her voice, but neither would she accept an overly simplistic and self-serving answer.

  “Well, then, it dates to my earliest memory. I was lying on my back in my crib. There was this beautiful, dazzling world above and around me, colors and movement and every gradation of light—the mobile of farm animals gently twirling, the endless patterns in the wallpaper, reflected sunlight sparkling on the ceiling: God’s creation in all its glory offered undiluted for my full pleasure and eventual use. But amidst and under all that wonder there was this void, this hunger. What’s worse, this hunger was not outside me, like all that enthralling color and movement and grace; no, it was somewhere inside me. It was then or soon thereafter that I realized that the center of this hunger resided more or less at the center of my body.”

  “At your cock.”

  The word in her voice should’ve shocked him but didn’t. He knew it only as an inaccuracy, or at least an oversimplification. “No, not exactly. For a while in adolescence and beyond, that organ became the central manifestation of the hunger. But both before and after that maelstrom, the hunger lived more peacefully but just as unavoidably further inside, at the center of my body, near the center of my pelvis and radiating outward from there. The longing always started far beneath the surface, wherever it ended up, however it gained expression.”

  “Inside? From the start?”

  Josh nodded. “Of that much I’m sure. It wasn’t because my mother didn’t nurse me or my father didn’t cradle me or the planets weren’t properly aligned at the moment of my creation. The longing was made when I was made.”

  Angie seemed to accept the assertion, or at least accepted that she’d get no further with the inquiry at that moment. “And the fulfillment?”

  Josh laughed. “Don’t know the concept. Never found fulfillment to that hunger, not in a whole life of searching in every conceivable—” He paused, thought the words nook and cranny but withdrew them as too suggestive. “—hiding place. Every possible hiding place.”

  Angie laughed. “And a few nooks and crannies.” Then she asked, “But why hiding place? Who was hiding fulfillment from you?”

  Josh thought that through. “The same one who put the longing there in the first place, the same one who dazzled me with his creation that still wasn’t enough—God, I guess. Who else?”

  Angie shrugged. “It’s your longing, your search, your fulfillment or lack thereof. You can blame whoever you want.”

  And Josh knew she was right. It was his, belonged to no one else, not even God. He’d held it close from the beginning, hoarded it as his most precious possession, the one thing no one could ever take from him or even share. Then he let it direct his life, lead him down so many misbegotten pathways. He’d held the hunger too close, strangled any chance of fulfillment before it had taken breath of life, given him the breath of life and freedom.

  “But no, that’s not true,” Josh shouted suddenly. “There were moments of fulfillment, the absence of longing—seconds, minutes, even days, whole weeks. Those first weeks with Laura, before we’d even kissed, no need for hope or expectation—everything I’d ever longed for present in her, in the face and arms and legs and heart and soul that was her (and for those first weeks, not a hint of sexual desire). And in the tiny newborn girl with dark hair and fragile eyelids that wouldn’t stay open no matter how hard she tried to keep them open to begin her quest to absorb the whole world. That newborn girl was my destiny. She took my longing and returned it as purpose. The fulfillment came from outside me. The longing went away only when I let it go.”

  He wanted Angie to know this truth, discovered at her prodding—here, at the last. But she was gone. His words, discovered because of her and offered finally to her and for her, rang emptily in his now empty mind.

  Laura had given up trying to rouse Josh. When she’d emerged from the bathroom to find him even paler than the pale dawn light, shivering slightly and breathing shallowly in broken groans, she’d tried to wake him by calling his name, first softly then loudly; by brushing his cheek then shaking his near shoulder; finally by lying down beside him, under the covers, hoping her warmth and proximity might at least comfort him if not call him back to consciousness. But nothing worked; his feverish unconscious persisted.

  She’d climbed out of the bed and called Sherri the day nurse who answered clear-voiced on the first ring despite the early hour. She’d responded to Laura’s inquiry if she should call 911 with a simple fact—“They’ll take him to the hospital.” Josh’d made it clear to all involved with his care that he didn’t want to see the inside of a hospital ever again; he wished to die in his house in h
is own bed and would pay for whatever care would be required to make that happen. Sherri told Laura to sit tight, that she’d contact Josh’s surgeon and call her back soon as she had any information.

  “And what should I do in the mean time?” Laura had asked.

  “Well, watch over him.” In her voice, the task sounded as simple and natural as “Boil water for tea” or “Put the clothes in the dryer.”

  Laura wouldn’t let it go at that. “And if he dies while I’m watching?”

  “He won’t, not yet.”

  Laura thought, Easy for you to say, but said, “How do you know?”

  But the line was dead. After a few seconds’ pause, a dial tone crowded out the deafening silence.

  So now Laura, still in her pajamas, sat in the armchair beside the bed watching over her dying ex-husband. The dim dawn became an overcast spring morning while she watched. Her emotions, cast in a jumbled heap by the trauma of her morning and the upheavals of the last few days, were not presently subject to disentanglement—she couldn’t conceive of trying to sort through the chaos. So she shoved that chaos into a closet deep within herself and shut the door to it, to be opened later or maybe never, she didn’t know.

  And she did as Sherri’d directed—she watched over Josh. She no longer tried to will him awake, but neither would she will him to die. She didn’t really will anything, not for Josh or even for herself. This march of events was beyond her shaping, had been for days. And years? Decades? That possibility passed across her consciousness like a shadow in some denser dark, then was gone.

  She took Josh’s near hand, his left, and held it loosely beneath the covers. It was cool but not cold and she thought she felt the pulse of blood in its veins, though maybe it was only her own pulse bouncing off his skin. And then she told him of her greatest loss.

  “You never knew her and I barely did but she’s us living on somewhere. She’s the best of what we had before we threw it all away or let the world take it from us or simply let it die like some hardy seeming plant that suddenly up and dies one day because we’d neglected to water it or give it enough sun. But the thing is it didn’t die but is out there in the world in her. Our love lives because it’s beyond our control or ability to strangle or starve.

  “I named her Brie, partly like the French cheese because I first realized I was pregnant while in France but more so because Brie seemed such a delicate, ephemeral word; and I knew any name I gave her would last only until they took her from me and her new parents would give her their name. So she was Brie for the four days until she was gone.

  “They told me not to let her mouth get near my breasts. She would smell the milk and want to nurse and that would be bad for us both. So I kept her away from my breasts while we lay together in the narrow bed but she smelled my milk anyway and nursed the air; and my breasts leaked away, soaking the maternity bra. So to distract me and her from the pain of that, I pulled the covers up over us both and we hid in that dim cocoon for what seemed hours. I’d hold her hand and count the five perfectly formed tiny fingers. ‘One, two, three, four, five’ then ‘five, four, three, two, one.’ And I would imagine the two of us lifting off in the capsule under the covers and rocketing to some other planet where all would be provided and we could live in quiet peace and happiness while I took care of her until she grew up and took care of me.

  “It’s difficult to express just how powerful and sincere that wish was for me then—that God or Fate or some Master of the Universe greater than our humble flawed selves might intervene and lift me and Brie from the path of inevitable separation and transport us to some more just world where bad choices and personal shortcomings were not the final rule. I wish I could recall the strength of that hope and live in it again. It must’ve been a powerful wish to sustain me through those four days that were a lifetime unto themselves.

  “Then the sisters came and took her. They didn’t make a big deal of it—just came in the morning before breakfast and took her away as if for a sponge bath but never brought her back. The thing that was different that morning was that Sister Trudy, the youngest sister and the only one to befriend me during my stay, came into my room after the other sisters had left with Brie and sat in the wooden chair beside my bed and watched me in silence.

  “‘You think I should cry?’ I asked her, dry-eyed.

  “She stared at me with the softest, kindest gaze I’d ever seen, before or since. If she’d said, that moment, ‘You can stay here with me,’ I would’ve never left, locked forever in her gentleness. But instead, she said, ‘Some do. It might help, or not. But you needn’t cry; there’s no cause for tears here.’

  “‘My baby’—I couldn’t trust myself to say her name—‘is gone forever. That’s not worth a tear or two?’

  “Trudy’s soft gaze held through my anger. ‘Your baby lives forever—in your heart and in the lives of all those she’ll touch. She’s your gift to the world and to eternity. There’s no sadness in that.’

  “The eternity part got me, and the tears did rush up then. Somehow I blurted out—‘And if she’s in pain and I’m not there? If she dies and I don’t know?’ Words couldn’t bear the sadness that opened in my soul.

  “But Trudy didn’t flinch. She took my hand in her two soft and warm hands. She had long white fingers with nails meticulously trimmed to the skin but no sign of nervous chewing or cracking. It was then that I realized that the only bare skin I’d ever seen of Trudy was her face sharply framed by her coif and those delicate hands that ended at the tight black cuffs of her habit. It was as if Trudy existed only as face and hands, voice and gesture, united in service. So compelling were those body parts and their sacred purpose that whatever other parts connected and sustained them, whatever skin existed invisible, faded into insignificance. I believe Trudy herself thought of her body in these terms—only eyes, mouth, and hands to witness, console, soothe. The rest was only to sustain these members and their holy function.

  “Trudy said, ‘She was baptized the morning after her birth, so she will never die. And if she hurts, your arms will cradle her pain, rock her till the pain goes away.’

  “‘Baptized? Why wasn’t I asked? Why wasn’t I there?’

  “Trudy smiled reassuringly. Her whole face participated in the expression. I will swear to this day that her face actually glowed. ‘Though it wasn’t about you, and didn’t require your permission, you were there. You were happy to give her back to God.’

  “I’ve never known if Trudy’s words were literal or figurative—if I were truly present at Brie’s baptism or present only in spirit. I have no memory of the event. But somehow in that one sentence offered with that angelic glow, Trudy gave me the strength to endure that day and all that have followed. Brie has been in the joint custody of me and God for the thirty-six years since. The day-to-day facts of her physical life have not concerned me for even a second’s passing thought. Wherever she is and whatever she’s doing, she’s safe in the care of our love.”

  Laura paused. She had no idea how many minutes had passed since beginning her heartfelt monologue that she now realized was a confession to Josh of the existence of a person that was, in DNA at least, half his. And if Brie had been, in some manner, fully hers for all these years, held in union with God outside the bounds of space, how could she presume with any fairness that Josh didn’t also hold some sort of ownership in her? At the moment, in this dim room with this comatose man, anything seemed possible. More accurately, everything was possible. The old parameters of her existence had to be abandoned, new order delineated. The soil she was now excavating, if fed into a centrifuge, would not yield a detailed printout of composition parts per million, but might instead yield forth a scent or a song, darkness or light, a window on a glowing new world or an endless spiral into blank oblivion.

  She still clasped Josh’s hand between hers. Where her skin ended and his began was no longer distinguishable—her skin one with his, his pulse and hers united. She studied his face. It seemed less taut
than earlier, his breathing less labored. Had he heard anything she’d said? Everything? Was his apparent ease real or imagined or an extension of her new calm? These questions flashed through her mind then were gone.

  She spoke again, this time directly to Josh—willed him to hear and understand. “I received a certified letter shortly before coming here from some Mississippi government agency. My daughter given up for adoption thirty-six years ago wishes to contact me. If I wish to contact her, I should call. I memorized the number without wanting to. But should I dial it? What should I do, Josh?”

  Josh gave no sign of comprehension or answer. Laura gently loosened her hands from surrounding his. She stood beside the bed, waited a few seconds for the dizziness to pass, then bent and kissed him on the lips, felt his exhaled breath force its way between her lips and down into her lungs. She stood upright and stared down on him for long seconds, studied his inscrutable expression. Then she turned to find some clean clothes in her suitcase, head for the shower, prepare herself for whatever day awaited her.

  Behind her, almost without audible sound, Josh sighed.

  That sigh was a fair summation of the trial Josh was passing through and the vision that was passing through him—the two conditions, trial and vision, simultaneous and indistinguishable from one another.

  It was a glow that was a fire that was gently warming that was scalding—first one then the other then both. There was no resisting the flame; it was everywhere, inside and out; it was himself, all that he was. How could he escape? Then just as suddenly there was no feeling, no self, only the glow that was the flame. The flame burned on into the night.

  He was thrown outward into that night, first only a little ways—the fire near, its warmth licking his skin. Then resolutely pushed farther and farther out—the fire’s warmth slowly fading, then even its glow in the dark steadily fading: dimmer then dimmer then dimmer then dimmer till it was the tiniest dot in a sea of black, a lone faint star’s light that travelled billions of miles with all manner of hazards in its path to reach his hungering eyes.

  Then he blinked and even this mere dot of light that had once been so much heat and brightness vanished, leaving only whole dark, with no end in time or space apparent.

  That’s when Josh realized he was home—his destination and his destiny. This was the room he had made for himself—stripped bare of all furnishings and appointments, of color and texture, of light and sound, and now finally of dimension, shape, space, time: the nest he had made for himself.

  Josh felt no shock or surprise, regret or remorse. He would not struggle against this fate. To the contrary, had he the ability to rise above and look down on the void that was now his new eternity, he would’ve nodded sagely at the propriety of it, the justice. As it was, his fading thread of self occupied the void, the void him, the two separate parts racing toward union, a final verdict.

  Except for the sound, so faint at first he questioned whether it was real or imagined, emanating from the vacuum that had no other aspect. A sound ever so faint, a song on the wind—gone then here, gone again, then back. Growing ever so slowly louder, ever so slightly stronger, a siren’s song in the dark, a whisper then a call, something to hold onto when there was nothing else. It hardly surprised Josh that the sound became a voice, and the voice was female.

  Sherri stood over Josh with the now empty syringe held aloft between her two fingers like a sorcerer’s potent wand. At the doctor’s orders, she’d administered a stimulant to counter the narcotic synergies of the mix of powerful painkillers.

  The effect of the injection was nearly instantaneous. Josh opened his eyes on Sherri and said, “Remind me not to cross you.”

  Sherri laughed. “I’m Catholic. I’ve been crossed a billion times since birth.”

  “Then you know that commandment—thou shalt not kill.” He was still staring at the menacing syringe, his fear only half-feigned.

  Sherri followed his gaze to the syringe, gave a small shrug, then dropped it in the bio-hazard bag and sealed the flap. “I know a better one—love your neighbor as yourself.”

  “Didn’t know that’d made the top ten?”

  “Hadn’t. Stands alone by itself, above all others.”

  Josh frowned. “Don’t guess I’d want the loathing some people have for themselves.” He wondered if he could get an antidote to whatever it was she’d given him and retreat to the quiet place he’d so recently inhabited.

  Sherri asked, “Where’d you grow up, Mr. Earl?” She began to pack up her nurse’s kit even as she waited his answer.

  “On a family farm in New England.” He paused then added, “I sometimes think I should’ve stayed there.”

  From behind him, Laura asked, “Why?”

  He rolled his head on the pillow and saw her seated in the chair just inches from the edge of the bed. The skin of her face was pale and taut with worry, her posture rigid and leaning forward, toward the bed. He wondered what’d happened since he’d last seen her, but would save the question for later. “Farm life is the right balance of linear and cyclical. You plant, you cultivate, you harvest; then you do it all over again—a straight line that is also a circle. Academia is just a jumble—no straight lines, no circles.”

  Laura leaned even closer to the bed and stared at his face. She nodded slowly, but seemed skeptical. Or maybe it was concern or distraction that he read as skepticism.

  He continued. “On the farm, the order is God’s. In the Ivory Tower of Babble, the order, if you could call it that, is human. I should’ve chosen God’s order.”

  “You didn’t know.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “Oh, I knew—from the start. But that didn’t stop me from walking away. That’s the perversity of free will—you can know the answers, know all the right choices, and still make the wrong choice just for the sake of making it.”

  “To spite God.” Laura said, still barely a whisper.

  Josh held Laura’s desperate stare for a few seconds then looked away. “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe just to rattle Destiny, shake up the order of those neat stacks of chips.”

  “As if Destiny cares.”

  “Oh, It does, in Its way. If It didn’t, all of our bad and petulant choices would’ve long since caused the world to cave in on itself.”

  “Or just the human race.”

  Josh nodded. “Yes. The rest would’ve continued in some better order.”

  “And we would’ve been long since forgotten, not even a footnote in eternity.”

  “Mmmm,” Josh agreed. “But we’re not.”

  “May be yet.”

  Josh shook his head once. “Not yet; not ever.”

  Laura glanced up across the bed. Sherri’s back was turned as she jotted something in her notebook. Laura quickly leaned forward, closing the few inches between her face and Josh’s, and kissed him fully on the lips. She held the kiss for long seconds, waited for his breath to push back against her mouth, inhaled the air his lungs had stripped of its oxygen, then slowly, reluctantly, leaned back away from him, back into her chair. Through her tears she whispered, clear-voiced and sure, “Welcome back.”

  Josh nodded acceptance but said, “I never left,” though he knew that wasn’t true.

  Sherri’s idle question that morning had shaken something loose in Josh; and as he lay in bed (what else was he to do—lying in bed was his existence now, here on out) in the bright afternoon with Laura in some other part of the house tending to her business, Josh’s mind drifted back to his youth on the farm.

  He thought of all the hours he’d spent on the tractor plowing the fields that would be planted to corn that would be chopped into silage that would feed the cows that would excrete their waste that would be spread on the fields that would be plowed and planted to corn. He clearly pictured the curls of dark, loamy soil that the plow turned over—the myriad earthworms exposed to sudden unfamiliar and undesired brilliance, the robins following the plow to feast on the worms, the tractor tilted to the left in t
he previous furrow, the belch of diesel exhaust rising into the clear spring sky, the roar of the engine blurring all other sound into a single seductive drone drawing him into a waking trance.

  Where those worms? Where the robins? Their DNA must continue, out there somewhere—their blend of ordered organic compounds disordered by time and chaos but passed forward nonetheless, existing out there somewhere as empirical components or perhaps rendered into new and complex organisms: an oak or a cattail, a raccoon or a dragonfly: but most assuredly out there, somewhere.

  Were he to return to that field, might he recognize—intuitively if not scientifically—some trace of that which he’d touched, of that which had touched him, in one instant out of one hour out of one day out of all those days out of all those years that seemed to pass so slowly but were in fact racing past and rushing him toward his future? And if he were to visit that former field, whatever its current condition as house or yard or parking lot or thicket, if he were to visit that field and find in it some trace of that which had entranced and enraptured and encased him in that one instant of that one day so long past, were he to be able to isolate that one bit of matter from that one day so long ago that had survived changed but the same till now, would it make any difference?

  Josh leaned into the unknown of that question. One might’ve guessed that such contemplations would’ve yielded a free fall into dangerous further unanswerables that might’ve swallowed him whole. But instead the open-ended and insoluble question not only accepted the weight of his longing without collapse but actually began to lift him gently upwards and onwards. What of the cows whose calves and milk bought his clothes and paid for his schooling? Surely their great-great-great-great-great-great-great great-granddaughters persisted somewhere, lived on in a stall or a pasture on some distant or near farm. The cats in the hay mow or the spiders in the eaves or even the kernel of corn planted in the soil he’d turned grown into the twelve-foot stalk ground into the silage chips fed to those cows collected in the manure spread on the frozen field flooded by the river in the spring carried off to the sea: a straight line sometimes requiring God force to be bent into a circle, but always bent, always a circle, never broken—not by illness or death or destruction or failure. Some trace endured, somewhere. Some trace persisted through every transformation across all these decades and all these miles to cradle him softly into full and secure rest.

  The ring of her cellphone (a measure from Pachelbel’s Canon in D) jarred Laura from her daze as she sat in the upholstered chair in Josh’s den with a book open on her lap but not reading it. She sat upright, picked up her phone, saw an unfamiliar number on the screen, and knew immediately who it must be. She’d not expected the call she’d made to the Mississippi adoption agency to yield such prompt results. She felt briefly dizzy. The room blurred then spun in one slow turn around her. She wondered if her hand would move to open the flap of the ringing phone—could her mind direct the nerves to direct the muscles to complete such a suddenly seeming complex maneuver: fingers to flap, flap to open, phone to ear. Would her arm even budge? Could it resist the inexorable tug of gravity long enough for her to raise the phone?

  Turns out it could and would. Fingers and hand and arm moved in coordinated action that seemed beyond Laura’s conscious intending. That moment, her linked appendages had a mind of their own, or an instinctive predisposition beyond her knowing. That moment, her body acted out a scene her mind (and heart?) were reticent to engage.

  “This is Laura,” she said. Even her voice, her vocal cords, seemed separate from herself, vibrating in coordination to produce sounds that were words she barely understood, from afar.

  “Laura Earl?”

  The woman’s voice on the other end was calm and sure, comfortable with emotional situations, maybe a policewoman or doctor or pastor. “This is Laura Earl.”

  “My name is Devon Atwater. The files at the adoption agency indicate that you are my biological mother.”

  A lawyer, then, Laura thought. “Devon.”

  “Yes?”

  “Your name. It’s pretty. Like the county in England.”

  “Or the deserted island in the Arctic Circle.” The woman laughed.

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “Few have; but they tell me it’s nice—for about two hours in late June.” Another laugh.

  “We’ll have to go there someday.”

  “Let’s.”

  There was a long silence. Each wondered if the other had ended the call, terminated this nascent relationship on a laughing positive if frivolous note. And each felt momentarily relieved at the prospect. Could further interaction improve on this light-hearted opening?

  Devon finally broke the spell of silence. “Do you want to see me?”

  “Yes, very much.” Laura’s voice was calm and clear.

  “Then where, how?”

  “If I could, I’d gladly come to you, wherever you are. But I can’t leave right now.”

  “That’s O.K. I’ll come to you. It’s how I’d planned it.”

  “Planned?”

  “In my head, since the day my mother told me I was adopted.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Twenty-nine years ago.”

  “That’s a long plan.”

  “More like part of me.”

  Laura paused. “Me too, I guess.”

  “A good part?”

  Laura shrugged, as if the gesture might be visible over the phone. “Just part of me—like my feet or eyes. Attached.”

  Devon laughed. “Like a mole or wart.”

  Laura could laugh with her. “I’m in North Carolina, near Raleigh.”

  “I’m in Austin, Texas. I’ll check into flights and call you back, quick as I can.”

  Laura said, “No rush. I can wait.”

  Devon said, “I can’t,” then hung up.

  That night after dinner Laura sat in the chair beside Josh’s bed and watched the sky beyond the picture window fade from turquoise to slate gray. The change in color prompted a gentle melancholia deep within her, a feeling she was dimly aware of and not entirely uncomfortable with. After her emotionally tumultuous day, gentle melancholia was the best she could hope for. Anything lighter, happier, would’ve been artificial, a lie—like dancing at a funeral or joking at a wreck. Such incongruity would’ve produced its own painful fall sooner or later.

  Without looking down, she extended her arm across the few feet of space and brushed Josh’s hand lying atop the covers. His skin was so cool she faced him quickly in mild alarm.

  He felt her touch and rolled his head on the pillow from where he too had been staring out the window. He smiled. “There’s something reassuring about the sky changing color. It’s the same sky and yet it changes in a way that we, in all our limitations, can record and react to.”

  “And mourn.” She immediately regretted the verb. It was stronger than she felt or intended.

  “I’m sorry,” Josh said. “It’s been a long day for you.”

  Laura shrugged. “And for you.”

  Josh shook his head on the pillow. “Not for me—wherever I was during all the excitement, it wasn’t painful or frightening.”

  Laura grinned. “Lucky you.”

  Josh nodded. “I’m well aware of that, and grateful.” He then added, “Laura, know this—whatever happens from here on out, I’m at peace. Part of that’s due to your presence, and for that I’m thankful beyond words, gratitude I’ll carry with me from this moment forward, wherever that leads. And part of it is trust in the One who is in charge of this show.”

  “I wish I could share that trust.”

  “One day.” He turned back toward the window. The sky had fallen beyond gray to black.

  “Josh, I think you should contact your daughter.”

  Josh faced her and winced, the first glimpse of pain he’d shown all day. “Angie?”

  Laura smiled. “Unless you have another daughter I don’t know about.” The unintended irony of her re
tort made Laura flinch beyond her grin.

  “She won’t come.”

  “Don’t you think that’s her choice to make?”

  “I reached out to her for years after the split.”

  “She’s older now. Hurt fades.”

  “For me or her?”

  Laura gazed at him calmly. She well understood his reluctance to open the closet within himself that had long been closed and locked. “Josh, forgive me, but where is that peace you just mentioned. If it’s strong enough to carry you through the challenges of this illness, then surely it can risk contacting your daughter.”

  Josh looked away. “She won’t come.”

  Laura sighed. “If you won’t contact her, may I try?”

  Josh faced her again. She thought she saw him blink away a tear. “I never said you couldn’t.”

  Laura nodded.

  They sat together in a pool of unbroken silence that expanded outward from this spot to fill the whole house, this young night.

  Then Josh said, “My address book is in the top right-hand drawer of my desk, though the address there is so outdated it’s probably useless.”

  “There’s always the Internet.”

  Josh nodded. “Can’t hide anymore, can you?”

  But Josh did hide, at least for a little while, under multiple layers of sleep then rest helped along by a mix of drugs that was both subtler and smoother in their effects than the earlier mix, more in balance with his physiology than the previous night’s whipsaw highs and lows of dazzling images (which he didn’t recall) and deep dark caverns that nearly enclosed him permanently. Tonight he passed gracefully through multiple layers of ease that felt like neither falling nor rising but more like floating through a space he didn’t recognize but knew to be safe. Some part of him felt a desire to record this slow but inexorable drift, document the feeling and the sights that were surely passing by, but he could discern no particular sight or sound or smell or touch or taste (except the taste like that of cold steel lodged in the back of his throat, which he knew to be the flavor of one of the drugs). Yet he knew he was moving, felt it with an inner gyroscope if not a concrete sense. And it was easy movement—almost narcotic in its numb comfort, yet he felt fully alert despite his lack of sensory ability.

  Then he was seated directly opposite Vicki, his deceased second wife. The distance between them might’ve been inches or miles, if distance mattered here (it didn’t). Her expression was clear-eyed and calm, the skin under her eyes and over her high cheekbones unfurrowed by time or age or worry. Was this how she’d looked when he’d last seen her, signing the papers at the lawyer’s office? Or some earlier memory of her, in some happier time? He couldn’t remember, had no clear memory of her from any moment in their nearly twenty years together. How could he not remember Vicki, the single person he’d been closest to the longest of any of his numerous loves? How could that be?

  His selective amnesia didn’t matter to Vicki or the moment. She had him now; his movement through unseen time and space was suspended. Josh was powerless to escape her gaze.

  Yet she seemed in no rush to seize her advantage. If she’d waited all these years to have him frozen before her, captive at last, she gave no sign. She simply sat there, calmly staring at him. Josh began to wonder if she were alive, if this really was his second wife or some long-delayed memory of her, some surprise gift to him in his waning moments.

  Then she said, “I remember you inside me.”

  It was Josh who was frozen now. If he had power of speech, he was too shocked to use it.

  “From the first time and all the times thereafter. It was like you were an extension of me—a six-foot-two, two hundred and ten pound appendage. You filled a void I hadn’t known I had; and once you filled it, it could never be empty again.

  “The pregnancy was a further filling, a filling beyond capacity. I was glad to have that come to an end, glad to once again have only you lodged at my center. I could’ve left it at that; that was enough for me.

  “Then later, when the tumor lodged at the very place where you’d once been, I blamed you. The void you’d left had been filled by something far more rapacious than anything I’d ever known. I was certain it was your fault; if you’d not left the void, how could the cancer have taken root?

  “It was only in my last days that I’d realized the mistake, and of course by then it was too late. I tried to explain it to Angie, tried to get her to promise to pass my apologies on to you. But I could see in her eyes that she’d have none of it, could see her shake her head and dismiss my words as delusional, the result of the morphine. She wasn’t ready to forgive you, even if I was. I went so far as to try to call you, dialing our old number and hoping it still worked; but the phone fell to the floor before anyone picked up at the other end, and the hospice nurse came in and set the phone on the stand, beyond my reach. She’d patted my hand, shushed my protests, and dialed up the morphine drip.

  “And that was it. I never had the chance to tell you I was sorry, that it wasn’t your fault—at least not in a timeframe that would’ve helped. And now look at you—far gone as I’d been and so weighed down with loss. What are we to do, Josh? What are we to do?”

  Josh stood before her in shock and guilt that gradually evolved into sadness and longing—longing for those lost days when they were a family with purpose and direction. Each of Vicki’s words struck the very heart of his being as objects with mass and velocity, leaving dents in his soul, marks that would never fade. And he didn’t want them to, desired that proof of her honesty no matter how much it hurt. He wondered now at how thoroughly he’d compartmentalized his regret at wronging Vicki and losing Angie, how the day after he’d been caught in adultery he’d set all the memories and emotions he’d had for his wife and daughter in a mental strongbox, closed the lid tight and double and triple secured it with unyielding psychic bands—a box sealed so tight not even the most violent of emotional tempests could wrench it open.

  But open now it was, by his deceased wife sitting right there in front of him talking of forgiveness and compassion.

  “The three of us were at the beach,” Vicki said. “It was one of those rare perfect beach days—neither hot nor cold, a gentle breeze but not windy, the sun warm but not scorching, the water turquoise clear, the sand like the softest carpet ever made. Angie, who was maybe seven or eight, was doing handstands—her newest skill and she was so proud of it. And during one of her handstands, you caught her feet and held her there for perhaps ten seconds while I snapped a picture of the two of you. I have that picture still—Angie with her arms extended, her body ramrod straight, you hand holding those feet, your face out of the frame of the photo. It’s a picture that makes more sense upside-down—Angie’s arms holding up the white sand, a young god carrying the world.”

  Josh remembered neither the moment nor the photograph.

  “Find her, Josh.”