Authors: Vestal McIntyre
Enrique would next see the model months later, in Miriam’s basement, littered with her little brother’s toy cars.
C
ONNIE DROVE HOME
from the nursing home under a blinding white sky, the kind of sky that could fall suddenly in big flakes that spiraled and hesitated, moving every which way in their paths to the ground—even up, as if they had second thoughts. She would have liked that, for everything to be muffled in white and frozen for later.
At home, she slipped off her white nurse’s shoes and sat on the couch. Allowing her mouth to hang open, she began to massage her jaw muscles with the tips of her fingers. She tried to remember to unclench her jaw during the day, but the moment her mind strayed, it buckled back into its habitual state. On the coffee table lay the massive book she had given Gene for Christmas,
The National Geographic Society Book of the Galaxy
. It had cost $25, the most she had ever paid for a book or, for that matter, any gift. She had thought Gene would like it, and he had seemed to, on Christmas day at his grandparents’ house. He had laid it open on the rag rug before the fire and studied it for hours. But as soon as they returned home, he had gone back to his drawings, maps, and charts. What was he doing?
She had never asked him. Why not? She was his mother, and she should check up on him. Aside from Christmas day, she had barely spoken to him in weeks. They ate their dinners in silence before going their separate ways. Enrique hadn’t been coming over. For all Connie knew, Gene could be completely alone in the world—as alone as she.
Connie got up and tapped on one panel of the accordion door. “Can I come in?”
“Yes.”
Gene sat at his desk surrounded by books. There were papers spread over his bed.
“Are you doing homework?” Connie asked.
“No, my project.”
“Your science-fair project?”
“The science fair is over.”
“Oh. Well, then, what project is it?”
Gene, who still hadn’t fully turned toward her, gave an exasperated sigh.
“Can you show it to me? I’d like to see it.”
The feet of his chair groaned as he pushed himself from the desk. The chair only went so far before it hit the bed, and Gene had to lift out his legs from under the desk. He carefully piled the papers on the bed, then set them aside. Then, from under the bed, he took a large sheet, which, unrolled, covered the bed. Connie wondered for a moment where he had gotten such a large sheet, then she saw that it was made of dozens of sheets of lined notebook paper taped together neatly. On it Gene had drawn a map of the world in black marker. Here and there across the world were circles of different sizes in red-, yellow-, and orange-colored pencil. The circles were perfect, as were the squiggling lines that separated countries. “Gene, this is very good!” Connie said.
Gene pointed to the largest, reddest circle, which covered the eastern part of Russia. “Lake Baikal is over a mile deep. It holds one-fifth of all the fresh water in the world. Its surface is twelve thousand square miles. It could hold under it enough carbon dioxide to suffocate every living thing in a five-hundred-mile radius, which would include Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, population one million.” He moved to another large red circle, a foot to the left. “The Caspian Sea is half as deep as Baikal, but thirteen times the surface area. It could hold enough to suffocate everyone in Tehran, definitely, possibly Kiev and Moscow, since they sit in this low-lying plane. Moscow could get it from these arctic lakes just as well. Lake Kivu”—he pointed to Africa—“is two thousand times larger than Lake Nyos. Two million people live on its shore, double that in a fifty-mile radius. It’s on a fault line, and the geological record shows there’s a massive biological extinction around it about every thousand years.” Gene’s reedy voice still showed no signs of changing. Seeming to love consonants, it parked at
k
s and spat out
t
s. “Ocean trenches don’t get stirred by the currents. If they stored carbon dioxide, they could kill everyone in the world. The Mariana Trench is six miles deep. It could suffocate everyone in the Caribbean. I haven’t worked out how many people that is. But if it overturned, there would be a tsunami that would wash over the islands and drown everyone anyway.”
“Gene, stop it!” Connie hissed.
Gene obeyed immediately and completely, putting his arms to his sides like a tin soldier. In his face, though, there was an embattled protest.
“Do you realize what you’re describing here?”
“It’s my project,” he said.
“You’re talking about the end of the world, the Rapture. That will be decided by the Lord God, and not by lakes and gases. The end of the world is Judgment Day, Gene. That’s the day we’re waiting for, the day we’re called home.”
“The world will still exist,” Gene said, “after the human race is extinct.”
“Hush!” Connie said. “Who’s been teaching you that? Your teachers?”
Gene was silent.
Connie’s attention cast around the room, as if in search of a culprit. “All these magazines and newspapers and books I’ve spent my hard-earned money on—I should have known they’d give you ideas. These are wrong, sinful thoughts, Gene. Do you understand that? This is like evolution or the Big Bang theory. This is what we Christians are fighting
against
.”
“The Big Bang theory will be proved by the year 2000,” Gene said.
“Stop it!” Connie cried. Her eyes finally rested on Gene, and she shook her head. “Where did you come from?” she asked him.
J
UST AS SHE
had planned, Lina went into Enrique’s room before bed that night and lay on top of the covers.
“Mom?” Enrique said after a moment.
“Yes,
mi vida
?” There was a smile in her voice, because, in gathering the words to tell him she had never dunked her head in the water, she had again remembered the funny faces he had made at the swimming pool.
“I was thinking . . . I might be getting too old for this.”
“For what?”
“For you to come into my room at night.”
Lina swallowed.
“We can’t do it forever. Don’t be sad.”
Lina sat up and faced the doorway so Enrique wouldn’t see the tears. She steadied her voice and said, “You’re right, Enrique. You’re too old.” She stood and left the room.
Jay, who was watching the end of a basketball game on TV, saw that Lina’s face was wet and shining as she walked through the living room to the kitchen, where she began vigorously scraping spots of food off the stovetop. A few minutes later, he saw Enrique duck into the bathroom, wiping tears from his eyes.
“Jesus Christ,”
Jay muttered to himself. He had had enough. Very loudly, he announced, “You both cry like little girls.”
From opposite ends of the house came similar-sounding cries of protest: “Shut up, Jay!”
This made him laugh. As far as he could remember, it was the first good laugh he had had in this house.
Enrique and Lina both heard this laughter—a high-pitched squawk, free of any note of cruelty. As wronged as they felt at the moment, this sound would lodge in their minds. They would remember it—as would Jay—as an announcement of a new era of equilibrium in the house. It was their Armistice Day, but it would pass without celebration.
A
bby sat in the Temple waiting room with a large textbook in her lap, doing a set of calculus problems, which was part of the packet of assignments she had picked up during her last trip home. Planted twenty feet apart in the gold-and-scarlet patterned carpet were two brilliant white columns, which rose high and divided into four angels whose wings lay flush against the vaulted ceiling. Clusters of impossibly green plants stood here and there among the seats. For a break between problems Abby looked up to gaze through the window, past a lawn, to the gift shop entrance in the visitors’ center. Here, she mused, sturdy Mormons from around the globe wasted their money on cards printed with the Temple’s famous spires, tiny burlap bags of salt from the Great Salt Lake, CDs of the Tabernacle Choir, and pocket-sized, leather-bound Books of Mormon.
A woman gently approached and tapped Abby on the shoulder. Abby took off the Walkman headphones she had been wearing to drown out the inspirational video they were playing on TV.
“I thought you might be able to use this.” It was the grandmotherly woman with thick arms who sat behind the desk, and she offered a folded TV table. She wore white loafers—nursing shoes, which seemed appropriate, because Abby had classified her with all those other secretaries and nurses, the annoyingly kind women with whom she dealt at her mother’s various appointments.
“Thank you,” said Abby. She slid her homework onto the next seat and stood.
“Oh, you sit back down. I’ll set you up.” The woman popped the table open and placed it squarely in front of Abby. It wobbled, so she kicked gently at one of the legs. “I’ve noticed you doing your homework here every time you come. Then yesterday I came across this in the staff room and I thought, ‘That young lady could use this.’ That’s a little better,” she said, pushing the table’s feet deep into the carpet.
“That’s a big help. Thanks.”
“You know, your mother is doing sacred work of the Lord that will bring her many blessings.”
“Uh-huh,” Abby said.
The shortness of the answer seemed to jar the woman. “I mean, some work for the dead—marriage by proxy, for instance—can only be done by members of the priesthood. And most of them don’t have time to come to the Temple regularly. We appreciate it.”
“Thank you.”
“Is your mom . . . all right? It looks like she might be going through some kind of treatment.”
“Yes. She’s in chemotherapy. And radiation.”
The woman nodded. “Well, I sure hope she gets better.”
Abby nodded. Then a voice inside said,
Why coddle this woman?
Was it Liz’s voice? Not really. Liz might have said the woman should mind her own business. Not to her face, but once she went back behind the counter. It was more Abby herself, the side of her that had grown weary of well-wishers, that prodded her to say, “Actually, she won’t. She won’t get better.” When the woman’s eyes widened, Abby added, “Sorry, I just don’t see the point in pretending.”
The woman nodded and heaved a great sigh, which, at its crest, caught a little in a sob. “I didn’t mean to be nosy,” she said, and she turned to go. Then she stopped and said, “I lost my husband . . .” She let a few nods of the head complete the story, because she couldn’t speak.
Abby softened. “Thanks for the table.” She lifted her books and papers onto it. “It helps.”
“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Abby.”
“I’m Sister Weller. I’ll be praying for you and your mother, Abby.”
Abby finished her calculus and moved on to
Crime and Punishment
, which she was reading for advanced-placement English. She made a point of resting the book on the TV table, in case Sister Weller happened to see, all the while chiding herself for being so Mormon, so ingratiating, about it. Then she heard her mother approach—heard her before she saw her: the wheels of the dolly on which she kept the miniature oxygen tank, then the hiss of the air.
“All done?” Abby asked.
“All done.”
Her mother’s wig was too low over the brow, as it always was when she put it on herself. Abby would fix it once they got to the car. Sandra steadied herself against the back of a chair while Abby put her books into her backpack. When they approached the desk, Sister Weller smiled bashfully and looked down to the appointment book, as if what she and Abby had discussed was secret. “Would you like to come again next Wednesday?” she asked.
Abby spread her own appointment book on the counter. “No, she has an appointment that morning. How about Monday?”
“We’re all full on Monday,” Sister Weller said. “Tuesday?”
“Another appointment.”
“Thursday?”
“No. She’s not usually able to come here . . . the day after.”
“Maybe I won’t come next week,” Sandra said. Her voice had a wheezy groan to it, like a badly played clarinet.
“Nope,” said Sister Weller with finality. “Monday it is.”
“Are you sure?” Abby asked.
“If Monday’s the day you
can
come, Monday’s the day you
will
come. Ten a.m
.
okay?” Sister Weller’s tone said there would be no more talking about it, and hinted at the strings she’d have to pull, but the tilt of her head and the set of her lips asked for no thanks.
J
AY WAS NO
good at baseball and didn’t like it, but he joined the team anyway, only to avoid a season of empty afternoons. The dreariness of the sport and the way games seemed to drag was given perfect expression by Mr. Shepherd, the sixty-something-year-old coach, when he nodded off in the dugout, arms folded over his belly, chin nestled into the roll of fat that insulated his neck. If a boy tickled the old man’s nostril with a straw, he’d snuffle and brush it away without opening his eyes. Jay would have joined Winston and their gang, who had enlisted in a boxing league in Chandler, but he couldn’t afford the fee.
He had done what he could to banish Liz from his mind after that afternoon at the Rollerdrome. Being the hero of basketball season had helped. But now, as he stood in the outfield with nothing to contemplate but the white scuffmarks on the cobalt sky, she sneaked back in.
At a pep rally last year, they and several other classmates had been called down to take part in a silly race which consisted of lying in a row on the gym floor and passing a stuffed animal—lion, Eula’s mascot—down the line using only their bare feet. Liz had been placed next to Jay. He remembered the U-shaped gap between her big toe and the next, her laughter, her shoulder pressed against his. When he passed the stuffed animal to her, a braided friendship bracelet fell from the place on her ankle where it usually lay, exposing a line of raw white in her golden skin. This was the color she must be under her clothes. She dropped the lion, and he jabbed her playfully. She jabbed him back.
To lie on his back next to Liz—in the grass under the stars, on the carpet before her TV, in bed . . . He had to stop imagining it, the longing was so painful.
Jay now insisted to himself that if she had smiled when she read his note at the Rollerdrome, if a dreamy look of reminiscence had come to her eye and she had held the note to her heart, then he would have left the Frogger game and taken her into his arms. He would have been that bold. Maybe they needed no words after the ones in the note. Things in life could be just that simple and easy—in fact, they
had
to be, when two people felt the same way. But she had crumpled the note. Jay had found excuses not to go to Winston’s after school so many times that the claim he made to Liz on the day he gave her a ride home—that he and Winston were “growing apart”—had come true.
The only way to combat this terrible longing was to do it again. Jay skipped lunch to strut casually into the library and down one of the aisles back to the wobbly old aluminum table that kept its wings at its sides, leaving only enough room on its top for the typewriter. His typewriter. Jay was sure he was the only one who used it. Beyond the small, circular keys, through the machine’s innards, he could see the surface of the table.
He took a sheet from his bag, fed it behind the roller, and cranked. Then he typed only one word: “Disappointed?”
W
ANDA LAY ON
the metal table, naked from the waist down and covered with a paper sheet. As a nurse helped her get her feet into the stirrups, Dr. Edwards squatted onto a stool and rolled out of view behind the skirt. “This is the only bad part,” he said as he eased in the speculum’s cold, metal bill. Wanda bristled with goose bumps. Then, with a few rapid clicks, Dr. Edwards pried her open.
“Too fast!” Wanda gasped. This machine could rip her.
“I know, I’m sorry,” Dr. Edwards said.
Wanda knew that minutes before, in another room, Randy had collected his sample and now Dr. Edwards had it there behind the skirt, in a plastic cup on a tray, most likely.
Both
collect
and
sample
seemed the wrong words. The former called to mind a boy collecting stamps or a girl collecting flowers; the latter made Wanda think of toothpicks standing in bright orange cubes at the supermarket:
Sharp Cheddar
. “I’d prefer it if
you
collected my sample, Mel,” Randy had joked at the dinner table the night before. He had removed his glasses for emphasis, O’ed his lips, and exhaled a coat of steam onto one lens. Then the glasses disappeared under the table, and his hand worked invisibly with a shirttail to clean the lens.
“I will if they let me,” Melissa had replied, never one to be cowed by a dirty joke. “Should I bring the Tiger Balm?”
“The what?” Wanda had said.
“Nothing,” Randy had said, blushing.
Now there was a brief tinkle of instruments behind the sheet and, with a snap that again made Wanda gasp, the speculum was released. Dr. Edwards pushed a cloth against her privates. “Try to keep this in place as you take your feet down now,” he said.
“Did you do it?”
“Yes, all done.”
“That was quick.”
Still on his stool, Dr. Edwards whizzed to her side. His head hung low between his hunched shoulders, not, it seemed, from poor posture as much as from an attempt to shrink into himself and seem benign. He wore sandals with socks, and his dimly lit office down the hall was decorated with ragged South American tapestries. “Women always say that. I suppose we’re all used to a little more fireworks surrounding conception, but if you think about it, fertilization itself is a very simple occurrence.” Dr. Edwards emphasized important words with a smile of wonderment, as if reproduction still made him marvel after decades in the business. “Two cells coming together.” He held up two fists and folded them into one. “Very small, very quiet. Let’s hope it worked.”
“Would you like Mrs. Weston-Sloane to come in?” the nurse asked.
“Oh, yes.” Wanda tucked the paper skirt around her legs.
“I’d like you to stay on your back for a few minutes, if you don’t mind,” Dr. Edwards went on. “There’s no proof it helps to let it sink in, but it certainly can’t hurt.”
He left the room, and Melissa came in. “How do you feel?” she asked, taking Wanda’s hand.
“Fine. It was nothing.”
“Randy had to go back to the shop, so it’s just you and me. Ready to be lazy?”
Melissa waited on Wanda for the rest of the day, allowing her to rise only to go to the bathroom. It was fun, like a grade-school sick day, but without having to endure (or feign) illness. Wanda watched movies on the videocassette player with Simon, the L-tailed dog, wedged beside her. She didn’t have a VCR of her own, and still could hardly believe she could watch anything she wanted without having to wait for it to come on the Sunday Night Movie. When Randy came home, he teased Melissa, saying that she was subjecting Wanda to the “rest-cure” (whatever that was) and that she should allow her to take a twilight walk in the woods. To this, Melissa dryly responded: “It’s half-medical—she has a better chance of getting pregnant if she sits still—and half-superstition. Oh, and half just for the fun of it.”
“Yeah!” Wanda agreed.
“That’s three halves,” Randy said, winking at Wanda. There was a little bit of effort behind this joking; it was the tiniest bit forced. But Wanda knew they were trying to let her know that they really did forgive her, and like her, and trust her. She appreciated it.
Randy and Melissa went to get dinner on, leaving Wanda in complete comfort. She rested her hands on her belly, closed her eyes, and visualized those two cells uniting in her.
T
HAT NIGHT, ABBY
told Liz over the phone, “I draw out my homework. I take longer than I need to because I’m afraid to run out.”
“Because then you’ll be bored?” Liz guessed.
“I’ll be bored, and I’ll be
all theirs
. No escape. They all tell me I work too hard.”
“Shit.”
“And when I think of the people, other than you, who I wish were here with me, I think of my mom—my
old
mom, before she got all churchy, back when she was mean and funny.”
“I liked her that way, too,” Liz said.
“Sure you did. Who wants a Mormon mom who hesitates to take pain pills because of the caffeine? She feels guilty about
all
her medications! And I can’t help but feel like, if she stayed the old mom, she wouldn’t be dying. But she became this way because she
is
dying. My thinking is all backward, but I can’t help it.”
As often happened on these phone calls when Abby inadvertently crossed a boundary, there was a rustling on the other end, Liz fiddling with the things around her bed—the tarot cards she had bought at a yard sale, perhaps, or the matryoshka dolls, egg women within egg women. It wasn’t selfishness, it was fear, so Abby didn’t mind.
“Anyway,” Abby said. “What’s new in Idaho?”
Liz gave a derisive snort of laughter. “Nothing, naturally. My secret admirer is back.”
“The one from months ago?”
“Yep.”
Abby’s grandfather called from downstairs.
“God,”
Abby said, “they’re so helpless. I can’t have an hour to myself.
What is it, Grandpa?
”
“Could you come down? Yer ma’s askin’ for ya.”