Range of Motion (11 page)

Sarah pointedly ignores him; Amy smiles shyly, moves in closer to me.

“Hello, Flozell,” I say.

“You bring me something today?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I got something for you.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s right. I got some peach pie make you jump for joy. Johnny brought it. I’ll give you a taste. She puts cream cheese on the bottom.”

“No, thank you. That’s nice of you. But we’re on our way out.”

“How’s your husband?”

I smile, nod.

He looks at Amy. “You come to see your daddy?”

I am getting very nervous. I look at my watch, take Amy’s hand.

“I seen lots of guys like him walk right on out of here,” Flozell says. “You got to be patient.”

“We have to go,” I say, and head out the door. I don’t know what to think about what he said. Neither do the girls. All the way back, nobody says a word, and when we get home we all go quietly to our rooms, close the doors without a sound. We remind me of nuns, minus the consolation of unswerving belief. Because despite my attempt at constant assurances to myself and others, I am well aware of the fact that there’s a door number three. And I am aware of what’s behind it. And what is not.

E
ight o’clock in the morning. I’ve just gotten up, made coffee, and am now sitting staring, bleary-eyed, at the Sunday paper. I won’t read a word of it. I don’t know why I don’t just cancel it. And yet it is comforting to come out in the morning and see two papers lying there, waiting. I put Alice and Ed’s by their door, just as they do for me if they get up first. I haven’t seen Ed since Alice told me. I don’t know how I’ll behave. Things will not be the same. How can they be? It will be like he’s been painted orange, and I’m not supposed to notice. If he smiles at me, it will piss me off. If he says he’s going to the grocery store, do I need anything, I’ll think,
Oh, yeah? The grocery store, huh? Yeah, I’ll bet
.

I hear a soft knock on the door, and Alice appears in her robe. It’s a faded blue quilted thing, about four hundred years old, rhinestone buttons, and she wears it with high-heeled slippers with pom-poms, given to her as a joke, but which she wears anyway. She thinks they’re fun, and they don’t make her feet hot as other slippers do. Among the things I like best about a good friendship are these kinds of revelations, these unveilings of selves we would never show to the world at large, though perhaps we should. Perhaps business meetings should start with people saying what they wore to bed last night. Jay used to go out for the paper in his T-shirt and boxer shorts. I always liked that, that selective boldness. He would never raise his hand in a crowd to ask a
question, but he would go outside in his underwear. “What if someone comes by and sees you?” I asked him once. And he said, after thinking for a minute, “You know, it’s never happened. But I guess I’d wave.”

Alice goes over to the coffeemaker and pours two cups, sets one down in front of me. Here is another thing I like about a good friendship, the go-aheadness of it all. You don’t have to knock to come in the door. You don’t have to ask to look in a refrigerator. You want coffee? Pour some. These friendships, formed by time, are getting so rare. I worry about that.

“How are you?” Alice asks, after we both take a sip of coffee.

“I don’t know. Discouraged. Tired.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I thought he said my name the other day.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No. I was on my way out when I thought I heard it. And I went over to him, but nothing happened. I waited, seemed like an hour, but nothing happened.”

Alice looks down into her cup, then up at me. “Listen, I’m taking Timothy out to the farm today. You want to come? Why don’t you come?”

Alice had a grandfather she adored who lived about thirty miles out of town on a farm. Most of the land was sold off after he died, but the family kept the house and they share it, use it for weekend retreats, hold family
reunions there. I’ve never been there, but she and Ed go at least once a month.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Ed’s not coming.”

I look at her.

“No big deal, he just needs to get caught up on work.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not what you think,” she says, a little impatiently.

“How do you know what I think?”

“Please.” She drains her cup. “Come on, come with me. You can go see Jay, then come with me. We’ll be back in time for you to visit him tonight again. You need to get out of here.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I want to be so far away. There’s not even a phone out there, is there?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t think so, then, Alice.”

“Lainey. What are the chances that something will happen?”

I get up, move to the bread drawer. “You want toast?”

She shakes her head no. I don’t either, but I slide two pieces into the toaster oven.

“Come on,” she says. “You’d be gone maybe five hours. It would be good for you and the kids. It’s like paradise there. There’s a brook. A tire swing. The people next door have horses, and a fat white pony who’ll stand and eat grass out of your hands all day. Come with me. It’s so peaceful, Lainey.”

I watch the toast browning. Who invented this appliance? It’s wonderful, really, although I once had a friend from the South and she made her toast in the oven and that tasted better. Of course, she also melted butter in a frying pan, lathered it on the toast with a basting brush. That’s probably why it was so good.

“Lainey?” Alice says.

“Yeah, all right,” I say. “After I see Jay.” I turn off the toaster. I’ll give the bread to the birds later. I like watching them eat, their weighty little hops, their heads cocked left, then right, then left again. I’ve been doing this lately, making things and then not eating them. The other day I made a cheese sandwich, put lettuce and tomatoes on it, mayonnaise, put it on a plate, cut it in half, then threw it in the garbage.

“Are the kids coming this morning?”

“No. I’ll bring them tonight. Twice a day is too much for them.” Last time we went, the kids got tired of being with Jay and asked to go to the day room. When I came to pick them up, they were together on a sofa watching an old, tremulous woman sitting beside them in her nightgown and attempting to nurse a rag doll. Close by, a glassy-eyed woman sat in a wheelchair while her husband stood behind her, brushing her thin white hair. “Yes, darling, it’s all right,” he was saying. His glasses had gotten too big for his face, and he had to push them up over and over again. When I softly called the kids and they came running to me, he
looked over at us and what I saw in his face was bewilderment. That’s probably what he saw in mine, too.

“Go,” Alice says. “I’ll stay here till the girls wake up. I’ll read the paper. They won’t sleep much longer.”

True. Amy’s probably up already, lying in bed doing something. She likes to play for a while in her bed before she gets up. Dress her paper dolls; string some beads; look at a book, yawning. Once she made Play-Doh pancakes, stacked them on one of her little china plates from her tea set, then brought them downstairs into the kitchen as a model for what she wanted for breakfast.

I’m like that. I like to do things in bed. I fold the laundry on the bed. Food tastes better to me when I’m under the covers. Bed is the only place to read, the best place to talk on the phone. Jay hates being in bed unless he’s asleep. Or … you know. He would lift my hair, kiss the back of my neck, breathe out my name. I would feel the warm air travel down my back and it would chill me. That’s how we almost always started. I see these videos advertised, ways to change your old routine. I never wanted to. What could be better than feeling that chill, then turning around into arms you’d memorized years ago?

I head for the stairs. Alice turns to the front page. She’ll read whole articles. It always seems like such a hard job to me to have to dig for the rest of the story on another page. I’ll read the front page sometimes, but then I’ll not bother to finish the story if I have to turn to another page. It’s not
always laziness. Oftentimes, it’s fear. Oftentimes, in fact, I don’t even get through the part on the front page. I get astounded. I get sad. I turn to the recipes for relief. Once, when I found something good I wanted to make and started to write down what I’d need to buy at the store I saw that my hand was shaking. And this was long before Jay got hurt. Small wonder, now that disaster has moved off the newspaper page and into my kitchen, that I have had to create Evie to tell me soothing stories. Domestic lullabies. Really, I should cancel the paper.

W
anda has Jay today. She is filling up the basin for a bed bath when I come in the room. I hold out my hand, introduce myself.

“Yes, I know your name,” she says. “We talk about you sometimes.” Then, hastily, “Nicely.”

I wonder what that means.

“I can bathe him if you’re busy,” I tell her.

She puts the basin on the bedside stand, pours some oil in it. “That’s okay. We have a lot of help today. I’ve only got five others. They’re done already.”

I look at my watch. Nine-thirty.

Wanda lowers the head of Jay’s bed, begins to wash his face. She is tender, thorough. She makes a little mitt of the
washcloth so water doesn’t drip off the ends. You don’t always see that. Most times Jay’s face gets scrubbed like a kitchen floor. But Wanda is the kind of nurse who takes her training seriously, the kind who won’t hold dirty linen against her uniform, the kind you see washing her hands in the little sink out in the hall many times a day. I sit down in the chair, watch her. She’s a very pretty girl, honey-blond hair pulled back into a braid, clear blue eyes, cheeks a nice pink color without the assistance of makeup. She wears tiny gold hoops in her ears. Her uniforms have flowers embroidered here and there—you have to look closely, because it’s white on white. I wonder if she does it herself.

“You’re new, huh?” I say.

“I’ve been here about three weeks now. I used to work at St. Mary’s. In the oncology unit.”

“You didn’t like that?”

She turns around. “Oh, no. I loved it. They had a problem with my … Well, the truth is I got fired.”

I stifle an impulse to leap up and grab the washcloth away from her. Instead, I begin watching her more carefully.

“I’ll tell you about it,” she says. “It wasn’t for incompetence or anything. But for now, just let me … I’d like to just pay attention to him.”

“Of course.”

She turns back to Jay, starts talking to him in a low, friendly voice. Her new car, she’s talking about. Five speed. Moves out. Smells like leather, though there’s none in the
car. Paid sticker price, couldn’t help it. And then how her garden has been planned, what vegetables she and her husband will harvest in the summer. “You’ll be out of here by then, of course,” she tells him. “I’ll bring some tomatoes over to your house; you can make your kids some BLTs. Your daughters are beautiful, Jay.” I lean back in my chair, and one-twentieth of my brain says wearily, “Say thank you, Jay.”

When she gets to his hand, Wanda exercises each finger independently, then moves all of them together. Yes, that’s right. She’s doing it right. I’ll go get a cup of coffee.

In the day room, I see Flozell sitting by the window with Johnny. And then see that a baby is lying in his lap. I stop, stare, then go up to him. When he sees me coming, he pulls the blanket down from a tiny, sleeping face. The baby is beautiful, curly eyelashes, a dimpled chin, hands resting across a chest not much bigger than a silver dollar. “Who’s this?” I whisper.

“My daughter!” he says. Not in a whisper. The baby startles, then stills. “Premature, but she out the hospital now. She fine.”

“What’s her name?” I ask.

“Tanesha,” Johnny says, at the same time that Flozell says, “Name is Jacqueline, after you know who.”

“My ass,” Johnny says, with what I can only describe as a kind of misplaced elegance. She speaks quietly, down her nose, as though she is saying, “Indeed.” She is quite beautiful,
really; and so petite, she can’t be over 5′1″. I wonder how she created this baby with Flozell. Surely he didn’t lie on top of her. He’d kill her. She is dressed in a floral print polyester dress, ruffles along the bottom and the top. A black leather jacket rests on her lap. Beside her, a huge black purse gapes open, revealing a pack of cigarettes, a gold cosmetics bag, a key ring with a rose captured in a plastic heart. “I’m the one had this baby and I’m the one named her. It’s on her birth certificate. I called her ‘Tanesha.’ Ain’t nothing he can do about it.”

“ ’Cept call her Jacqueline,” he says. “That’s just what I intend to do, call her Jac-que-line.”

Johnny chews her gum for a while, swinging her crossed leg and watching him with slit-eyed affection. Then, “You call her that, she stare right into space. She ignore you. You ain’t around enough to have no influence on her.”

Flozell looks down at the sleeping face. His lower lip is pushed out. He is pouting magnificently.

“How’s your husband?” Johnny asks me.

“He’s being bathed,” I say, as though that answers the question. Johnny nods, looks down at her purse, sad for me. The first time I met her, she asked, “What’s wrong wid your man?” She was wearing large hoop earrings and I remember staring at one of them when I told her. She blinked, then said, “Whew, Lord!” She reached out for my arm, squeezed it.

“I just came in here for coffee,” I tell her. “Can I get you some?”

“No thanks,” she says, and then, to Flozell, “Give me that baby back now.”

“Not yet,” he says. “No.”

“Sheeeit.” Johnny resettles herself in her chair, smiling so widely I can see the gold repair on one of her back molars.

I fill a plastic cup half full of the day room’s awful coffee, carry it back to Jay’s room. Wanda is pulling his covers over him. “All done,” she says. The odor of ironed sheets is in the air. Everything in his room has been straightened, cleaned. The bottles on top of his nightstand are lined up, the telephone dusted.

I walk over, kiss his cheek, put my hand on the top of his head, look closely into his face. “Jay,” I say. “I’m here.”

I wait a moment, then straighten, look over at Wanda. She is standing by the door, watching me.

“So what do
you
think?” I say.

“I think all things are possible,” she says. “I think what we don’t know about medicine is as vast as outer space. Is that what you meant?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

She opens the door. “I’ll be right back. I need to hang his feeding.”

I sit on the bed, take Jay’s hand. “Breakfast time, Jay. What do you want?”

As if I didn’t know. Regular coffee in his regular cup at his regular table. He has a cup that has a Corvette on it. The picture of the white ’56 has nearly faded away. We went to
look at Corvettes once. Jay sat behind the wheel, and I watched him from the front of the car. It was a new one. I told him I didn’t like it, that it looked like a Dustbuster, but I did like it, mostly for the way Jay’s face looked when he turned on the headlights and they came flipping up out of the body of the car. I thought, when those kids are done with college, we’re taking out a loan and buying one of these. Even if we have bifocals.

“I just saw Flozell’s baby,” I tell Jay. “He has a baby! And she’s so beautiful. You remember when Sarah was born and the doctor told you to tell me what sex she was? And you weren’t quite sure, because the umbilical cord confused you?” I smile down at him. If I try, I can imagine that his eyes are only closed to hear me better. “We were supposed to have a fancy dinner, but it was too late at night,” I say. “So they brought us all the stuff they could find from the little kitchen there, remember? We got toast and jelly … Jell-O, graham crackers … what else? I don’t know, it didn’t matter, everything tasted wonderful. And I remember you had some apple juice and you started to toast Sarah, you held this little flowered paper cup up to her and started to say something and then you just started crying and then I started crying. Everybody cries about babies, huh, Jay? Maybe we should have another one.” I say things like that sometimes, and then immediately feel as though some bottom has dropped out, as though I’m driving along and the road suddenly disappears. And I am sitting there, suspended
in black space, my hands fiercely clenching the steering wheel as though I still had some control. I shouldn’t say things like that.