The Vagabonds (22 page)
“They don’t know. They think maybe a heart attack. Or a stroke, a minor stroke.”
“Who’s they? Where
are
you?”
“Florida. In Bradenton. The hospital. He’ll be all right, they think, but he did ask me to call you.”
“They
think
he’ll be all right?”
“It’s serious,” says Robin. “Jimmy was complaining all last night. He was having leg pains, pains in both his legs and chest, and finally this morning when he had trouble breathing and we were driving past a hospital and it wasn’t getting better I thought, and he agreed with this, maybe we ought to go in.” His voice rises—high-pitched, querulous, as though this too could somehow be her fault. “To the Emergency Room, I mean, here at Manatee Memorial, and he’s resting comfortably but it hasn’t been a cakewalk . . .”
“Bradenton? Where’s Bradenton?”
“Near where I live. Longboat Key.”
“Hold on. Hold on a minute, will you?”
“Yes. OK.”
She shuts the door. Upstairs her daughters are heedless, laughing, and Claire does not want them to hear. She can remember sitting in the kitchen with Joanna and David when they were young and when their mother learned by phone their father had been killed. The phone had rung, and they’d been eating bacon, and she never could eat bacon again or smell it without feeling sick to her stomach and wanting to be sick. But
this
isn’t like that, not like it at all; this is
not
a policeman or car crash, and she tells herself Jim will be fine. Jim is her husband and she is a grown-up and he will be fine; there’s no reason now to panic, she tells herself, and fetches a pencil and pad. Still, panic is the word for what she’s trying not to feel and terror for what she suppresses; Robin gives her his telephone number and she writes it down carefully, twice. He’s been deciding, he tells her, if the hospital at Sarasota—Sarasota Memorial Health Care—would be better for a heart attack, if that’s what they decide it’s been, but so far the tests are negative and what that means in terms of the prognosis is positive, it’s a relief, but they’ve been monitoring the patient all morning as a precaution and the Emergency Room doctors in Bradenton are excellent and he lives thirty minutes away. It’s funny, isn’t it, says Robin, all that exercise, all that fresh fish he insists upon eating and this is what he gets.
Claire sits. He
hates
fresh fish, she says. The shared attempt at humor, or at least lightheartedness, establishes a bond between them, or at least some sort of connection; they care for the same man. It’s ironic, isn’t it, he says, we drove the whole way here together and he hasn’t yet seen my apartment. Jim will get better, I’m certain, Claire says, he’s always been strong as a horse. I’ll stay in touch, says Robin, I’ll let you know as soon as there’s news, he does want to talk to you and says to kiss the girls.
She calls Northwest Airlines, in case. There’s a flight to Sarasota that is overbooked but one to Tampa she could make, and one the next morning, at 9:15; she reserves a seat, in case. Then she remembers that Meme and Arthur Lowenthal have a condominium in Longboat Key, and she calls Meme Lowenthal to ask about the area; it’s terrific, Meme tells her, you can see the Gulf and Tampa Bay from our balcony and there are golf courses everywhere, why do you ask? She says, Jim’s down there, he’s on a business trip but he isn’t feeling well, and Meme says—not pausing, with the openhanded generosity of the insouciant rich—of course you must use our apartment, it’s completely empty and you’re completely welcome if you feel you ought to go. It might be an emergency, says Claire, and Meme says well even if it isn’t you should hop that plane and join him, dear, you can’t imagine the pleasure of watching all those pelicans from up above, the way they dive, and sometimes in the afternoons there’s dolphins a few feet offshore. I can give you names of restaurants in Sarasota; there are three of them we like a lot and one you mustn’t miss. Also, the Ringling Brothers Circus Museum and Mansion; it’s a hoot. Do you know anything, asks Claire, about Manatee Memorial, the hospital in Bradenton, and Meme tells her no. But Arthur would, I’ll ask him, he’s got colleagues down there, I imagine, he’s got colleagues everywhere; I’ll get back to you, she promises, and give our love to Jim.
In this manner Claire passes the time. The girls go off to Briarwood; there’s a sale on running shoes and they require new ones, they tell her, there’s no support in the shoes they’ve been wearing; the treads are entirely gone. Hannah demonstrates this by lifting the heel of her sneaker, and indeed the heel has been shredded away, so Claire gives them money for the bus and money for two pairs of shoes and they promise to be back by five. She wipes down the powder room sink. Outside, light snowflakes fall. She makes her bed and starts a wash and tries to decide if she ought to fly south and if Jim would be relieved or angry that she came. Then she waters the houseplants room by room and checks the kitchen and the pantry shelves, but there is nothing out of place and nothing to buy that requires a trip to the market and no television show to watch or article to read. She tries to focus on what happened just this week in Saratoga—
Saratoga, Sarasota
—her sister and brother and mother’s old house, her argument with David and hopes he understands it isn’t, wasn’t serious, that in her heart of hearts she has apologized already and will do so on the phone today and promises herself she’ll call her brother and sister in Wellfleet later on. She occupies herself with place-names—
Saratoga, Sarasota
—and turns on the Weather Channel but there is nothing to notice, warm weather down in Florida until the telephone rings.
This time it is her husband. “Claire?”
“How
are
you, Jim?”
“I’m fine. Well, feeling better. And it’s nothing to worry about.”
“What happened?”
“Not a heart attack. They’ve ruled that out.”
“That’s good. That’s excellent.”
“They’re discharging me,” he says. “I’m going to Robin’s apartment.”
“OK.”
“This place isn’t exactly what I’d pick for vacation. Not a cakewalk . . .”
“No.” That had been Robin’s word, a
cakewalk,
and Claire tells herself she doesn’t mind; they are entitled to shared language, a word the two men use together. “Cakewalk?” she repeats.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it, we drive the whole way down here and I haven’t even made it out to Longboat Key. It’s Sunday already . . .”
“You will.”
“It’s like the promised land or something.”
“Except you aren’t Moses,” she says.
He clears his throat. “They want me to report back tomorrow on an outpatient basis. How
are
you? How are the girls?”
She tries to say something that matters, tries to reassure him that everything will be all right, and what he must do is take care of himself and not worry about her or Becky or Hannah or anybody but be very very careful; she’ll fly to Tampa if he wants or wait in Ann Arbor until he returns. She has not of course forgotten the things he said or how he departed on Valentine’s Day, but maybe this is a signal, some sort of second chance or—what do they call it?—warning shot across the bows. You’ve been working too hard, she says to her husband, you’ve overdone it probably and hears with gratitude his murmuring assent. He says something that she can’t quite hear about fried food, hush puppies, too much good old southern cooking and how it was probably just indigestion, and through the fade-in, fade-out of his pay phone in the hallway Claire discerns, or thinks she does, that Jim is feeling impatient—but not so much with her, with
them
as with Manatee Memorial and the Emergency Room doctors who expect him back tomorrow for a second look-see and second round of tests. How’s Robin holding up, she dares to ask, and her husband says, oh Robin’s the gold standard, he’s being completely a brick. Meme Lowenthal, Claire says, owns a condo out on Longboat Key that overlooks the Gulf; she offered it in case you want or need to stay and he says yes, except I’m staying at Robin’s, remember? I didn’t mean, she starts to say, and he says I know what you mean. Claire controls herself; her husband is not feeling well and so she tells the telephone, all I’m saying is there’s an apartment and he says I don’t need the Lowenthals’ help.
What happens next she knows on the instant she will not forget and will remember forever: Jim coughs; he gasps, he rattles in her ear as though there were a thunderstorm, a wave of water in the line she knows cannot be static and then the phone goes dead. She stares at the receiver: “Jim,
Jim,
” she repeats to the plastic. She waits for him to call again and when her husband doesn’t call Claire presses Star 69.
It reconnects her to nothing, however; the line does not respond. She calls the number at Robin’s apartment, the one she’d copied earlier, but there is only a machine and she leaves a message saying
This is Claire, I’m very worried, I don’t know what’s happening. Please call.
She will learn what happened later, from the hospital authorities; she will be told he had been speaking to her in the hallway by the pickup door where he was waiting for Robin, and even though it was a hospital and they had an emergency team on the scene in thirty seconds there was nothing to be done. Jim dropped the telephone receiver and collapsed on the hallway floor. The long drive to Florida would seem, his doctors said, to have occasioned an occlusion in his arteries but when they perform a postmortem they will find nothing in his legs, no secondary emboli or blood clots that would suggest a passage upward to the lungs. They cannot be certain or determine absolutely if this was an accident waiting to happen or something the trip triggered and if a regime of medication could have helped. What he was suffering from, they informed her, was a pair of massive pulmonary embolisms, and they killed him instantly and he could not be revived.
Claire doubts this; she’s tempted to sue. She’s sure the doctors were incompetent; Jim was complaining of leg pains and chest pains and had driven more than a thousand miles and why not diagnose or at least consider the possibility of an embolism and give him blood thinners at once? She imagines herself on the witness stand in Bradenton, asking for punitive damages and being cross-examined and persuading a jury that millions of dollars will teach those Emergency Room physicians a lesson; she raises her right hand and promises to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help her God.
But soon the image fades, goes flat, and she knows she will not file a suit or pursue a case for damages in Florida. She has been left, irrevocably, utterly, and nothing she can say or do will change the way he left. Let Robin handle this, she thinks, let him be the responsible party and explain how Jim just happened to be driving by, on the way to Longboat Key and not in his Ann Arbor home. Outside, the dark grows visible; light snow beyond the pane. Robin calls and tells her what he does and doesn’t understand about the way her husband died; they commiserate together and complain about the doctors, the behavior of the hospital. I can’t believe it, Robin says, I can’t
believe
it, Claire. She pours herself a glass of wine and drinks it gulpingly; she pours a second glass and asks herself how could it be—some God of bad coincidence, some melodramatic puppeteer!—that Jim should have collapsed while talking to her on the phone and saying he felt fine.
She drinks. Jim left her, chose to leave her, and just the way their father did he died on the road with a stranger; on a Sunday morning these two men—married and unfaithful, both—were killed because of cars. They both have been extinguished by a just and vengeful God. As soon as she formulates this phrase, however, Claire is ashamed of herself, astonished she could
think
it even, and finishes the second glass of wine. The inventor of the automobile has a great deal to answer for, and if Henry Ford were still alive she’d give him a piece of her mind. She is not used to drinking, or at least to drinking by herself, and she watches her reflection in the window of the house—a widow, a mother of young daughters, a woman with no surviving parents in the middle of Ann Arbor—until she starts to cry. What has she done, what has she ever done to be so left alone, so utterly bereft while the girls are buying sneakers somewhere out in Briarwood and their father died?
It isn’t a question she answers, or can; she tells herself she has a reservation on a flight tomorrow morning, early, and if she wants to take it—does she want to take it?—she should pack. She packs. She calls Meme Lowenthal and says Jim died, my husband died, I’m taking you up on that offer if the offer stands. Meme is horrified, aghast; she says of course, of course, I’ll call the caretaker and tell him you’re staying, how else can we possibly help? The afternoon wears on, wears down, and by the time the girls return Claire has created a semblance of order: she will, she knows, retrieve their father and fly his body back.
2003
F
rom the Tampa airport Claire makes her way to Longboat Key; once more she has rented a Hertz. The sky is a bright blue. There is a causeway and a toll-bridge spanning windswept water, with traffic streaming south. Trucks barrel past her, swaying. She searches for
Fresh Air
or something familiar on NPR, but all she hears is talk about God and men chattering in Spanish. St. Petersburg has apartment buildings clustered to the highway’s edge, and she imagines old people inside, staring out their plate-glass windows at palm trees and the bay. Claire holds to the wheel with both hands. She passes a baseball stadium and high-rise complexes with advertisements for Immediate Occupancy, then follows the exit for Route 41; there are billboards for tires and blown-up photographs of lawyers, malpractice specialists, and signs that make her welcome to the Sunshine State.
She does not feel welcome, however. She is traveling through Florida to bring her husband home. All around her she sees seabirds and uninviting strips of shore and there are gas stations and video and convenience stores and banks. In Bradenton the road winds past Manatee Memorial, where Jim had been a patient, where he was treated and released and collapsed inside the pickup door. She slows but does not stop. There is a store called Piggly Wiggly and something called the Chop-Shop and signs for furniture and funeral homes and insurance companies; then the traffic reduces, dispersing, and she comes upon a causeway with cars parked by the water and people on deck chairs or fishing. The radio is telling her that manatees are dying along the Inland Waterway in unprecedented numbers and environmentalists are pressing for a ban on motorboats and Aqua-skis; the sea cow will be endangered if the present trend continues and Florida cannot afford to lose its population of manatees, its weed-eaters in the Inland Waterway.