Rise (22 page)

They'd been sick together for three years. He'd stopped working first and then she stopped, too, and they stayed inside the apartment. They watched
Baywatch
reruns and old cartoons and anything but the news or medical shows. They shared their medicine and their needles, and none of it mattered. A hundred people had come to his memorial. They came from the studio and from his writers group, and his fraternity brothers came all the way from Ohio. Everyone came, it seemed like, everyone but her mother, and they waited in line to step up to the podium. They told stories about somebody she didn't know. She'd lived with him for almost ten years without ever learning he could juggle or that he'd played chess in high school. His brother told how Gary had stolen a scooter once from the college faculty lot. He drove it down the town hall steps and landed in the fountain. People laughed at that. They clapped their hands and shook their heads, and their stories made her lonely. Everything he'd seen and done, he took it with him. She'd already forgotten the sound of his voice.

Her mother stomped her boots before climbing back in.
Next time you'll come out
, she said. She drove slowly to the gate. She always drove slowly, even on Powers where the traffic was heavy and people were rushing to make the light.
You can't see the flowers from the car. You can't even read his name
. She turned on the defrosters because the windows were all steamed. They went past the matching stone benches where the city founders were buried. The Madonna stood between them, and her arms were open wide.

They walked the block at three o'clock most afternoons, and then they watched
Judge Judy
. Angela shuffled along. Even on cold days it was better than staying inside. The mantel clock made her nervous how it chimed every quarter hour. They were coming around on Brentwood when her right leg buckled. She felt no pain as she went down. She landed in a mound of freshly shoveled snow. It was soft as powder and not gray yet from the cars. Not like that Sierra snow that came down like cement. She lay on her back with her mother leaning over her.
What's wrong with your leg
, her mother was saying.
Did you slip on a patch of ice?
But Angela just lay there and looked up at the sky and her mother's worried face. She wasn't cold, and she wasn't frightened. She wanted only to lie back against the snow, to close her eyes and sleep.

Her mother brought out the wheelchair the first week in December, the foldable one from when she'd sprained her ankle in Boulder. It hurt worse than a fracture, her mother had said at the time. Sometimes it's better when things break clean. She took out the chair and wiped it down, and Angela didn't complain. What use was it when anyone could see that she couldn't walk, not even to the mailbox out by the fence. They went together around the block when the weather was clear because it was better than medicine to breathe in the air. Her mother talked while she pushed the chair. “What a shame about the Gerbers,” she said. “They've really let things go. Every Sunday they go to Red Lobster but they've got no money for ice salt to keep folks from slipping.” Angela nodded while her mother talked. She held tight to the armrests.

The neighborhood had changed. Her mother was right about that. The Danzigs were gone and the Lucas boys, too, and not even the snow could hide how the new folks had neglected their yards. And still Angela recognized those houses and the bare elm trees. Her mother struggled a little where the Cleyman's maple had cracked the cement. She pushed hard on the chair, and together they went over the sidewalk where Angela used to ride her bike. More than thirty years later and Angela knew it better than the streets she walked every day back in LA. She knew its cracks and how it curved and all the spots she'd fallen.

Five houses up another pair was approaching. A figure with someone else in a chair. As they came closer Angela recognized old Mrs. Needleman wrapped in a plaid blanket. Her granddaughter was pushing her along. “Look how nice they've got her covered,” her mother said. “Last March she was a hundred. They showed her picture on
Good Morning America
. The Governor sent her a card.”

Her mother waited in the Meyer driveway when Mrs. Needleman came close. “The sidewalk's too narrow for us both,” she said in greeting. “Even when it's shoveled.”

“Another day like this and the last of it will melt,” the granddaughter said. She stopped the chair and stood on the sidewalk and looked up and down the street. “It's warm as April today.”

“How are you, Mrs. Needleman?” Her mother reached for the old lady's hand. “It's a nice day for a walk.”

Mrs. Needleman looked at Angela and at her mother and back at Angela again. “I remember you,” she said. “You always walk that little dog and never pick up the poop.” Her eyes were sharp. “You listen to that strange music.”

“Mrs. Needleman,” her mother said. “Angela hasn't been here in years. Not even to visit. She's been in Los Angeles. She decorates sets for movies.”

“I want to go home,” the old woman said. “I've got people waiting. My husband's waiting for me on the bridge.”

The granddaughter shrugged as if to apologize. She held out both her hands and smiled. She's stopped making sense, she seemed to say, but Angela understood.

•

Starlings flew in formation just outside her window. At ten thirty every morning they went over the house and back again, and the sky was black with their passing. They moved as if pulled by some hidden current, and she leaned against the window frame to see. She wanted to take a picture of them. She wanted to capture them just as they were. She had the camera ready. She steadied her hands as best she could, but the pictures were unfocused and smudged by the screen. She just watched them after that. She leaned close to the windowsill, and her breath steamed against the glass. They should be someplace warmer, but they went over the treetops. Toward the mountains and back and around again, and she tried to remember them as they went. She tried to remember the sky and the snow on the peaks and those black winter birds. She wanted to take them with her.

Dialysis with the angry nurse who rimmed her eyes in liner. She wasn't gentle with the line. Dialysis until the dialysis would stop working. This is how it would go. One thing fails and then another and another one after that and the sky outside the window was beautiful as any she'd ever seen. A blue so pure it would burn your eyes and the wind lifted the snow from the rooftops and bent the naked branches.

We're just leaves on a tree
. That's what Gary told her once. They were rockhounding in the Mojave. Looking for crystals in the trailings of old borax mines and the hills were pink in the distance.
Leaves on a tree
, and their hike wasn't even half done yet, and he closed his eyes the way he did when he was happy.

Sleep all day. Sleep from noon into night and then lie awake and listen to the heater fire up in the basement. Listen to the wind as it blows. Sleep and more sleep and it was never enough. It was sweeter than food. Sweet as liquor and she wanted more. She slept when her mother pulled open the drapes. She slept when the vacuum cleaner ran or the doorbell chimed. She slept when her mother read from the book, and she didn't dream. No, she slept the way babies do. Like someone waiting to be born.

•

Once there was a boy who wanted only to go home. His boss wished him well and gave him a lump of gold as big as his head to thank him for his service. But the gold was heavy and when a rider came along the road, the boy gladly traded it for the horse. But the horse galloped and threw the boy and when a man came by with a cow, the boy traded in his horse because walking was better than riding. And the cow became a piglet because beef was stringy but the piglet had sweet juices. And the piglet became a goose because there was nothing better than crackling goose skin and the fat beneath. The boy was happy with all his trades until he saw a scissor-sharpener working by the road.
How lucky you are
, the boy said,
to know a fine craft
. The kind man looked around for a good sharpening stone and found one in the field.
Here you are
, he said, and the boy took the stone in exchange for his goose, and he was happy again because fate provided. But the stone was heavy and he wasn't careful and it fell into a stream. And the boy thought how lucky he was, how truly lucky, to be free of this heavy stone, and he walked the rest of the way home.

Things were crawling under her skin. They lived inside her belly. The slightest touch raised bruises. They spread in clusters across her legs, and on Christmas Eve the whites of her eyes turned yellow. She scratched her arms and her neck until her mother threatened to put mittens on her hands. “Those cuts will get infected,” she said. “There's nothing wrong with your skin,” but Angela scratched anyway. She tried to find those things that turned circles inside her. She needed to get them out, but they were always faster.

Her mother washed her in the tub. She sponged water over her head, and it was peaceful in the house. The clock was chiming and the windows were dark, and her mother turned the spigot because the water was getting cold. “All these things will wash away,” she said. “You're the same as when you left.”

She combed through Angela's hair and braided it loosely down her back. She talked, and Angela followed the sound of her words. She listened to their familiar rhythm. Her mother was saying it was
the devil's virus. The devil should take it back. She needed to be strong for another day and another and the doctors would know what to do. Her eyes were black in the bathroom light. Dark like her mother's had been and like Angela's, too. And if Angela had had a daughter her eyes would have been dark, too, and it was a ribbon running through them, this blackness. It bound them all together.

“I'm sorry,” her mother said. “I should have gone to his service. It wasn't right to stay away.” She held Angela's hand like a parishioner looking for a benediction. She held it and squeezed it and cried.

It was time to ride in the car. She knew it without her mother saying so. Her mother didn't struggle when she lifted her up. How could that be? She was almost seventy, and she carried Angela from the wheelchair to the car. Her mother let the engine warm up and turned on all the heaters. She tucked a blanket around Angela and pressed her palm against her cheek.

They were going to the hospital. They were going to the high school and the cemetery and the Citadel Mall. The radio was playing, but Angela didn't know the song. It was one of her mother's stations. Her mother was talking. She was saying something. She was reading from the yellow book of stories, and Angela was lying in bed and she knew all the words. Hans im Glück was going home. He was free of all his gold. The stepmother chased the princes from their castle, and they were swans when they flew. They were starlings, and the sky was full with them.

L. Annette Binder
was born in Germany and grew up in Colorado Springs. Her fiction has appeared in
One Story, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Third Coast
, and
Fairy Tale Review
, among other places. Her story “Nephilim” was included in
The Pushcart Prize XXXVI
and performed as part of NPR's
Selected Shorts
. She has an AB from Harvard in Classics, an MA from Berkeley, and a JD from Harvard Law School. She is a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine.

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