The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (57 page)

In
Now, Voyager
… The hell of it is he can’t remember exactly what in
Now, Voyager
. Not important. Bill is sharp. He walks two miles every morning, reads the paper, does the taxes, writes regularly to the children, keeps track of the bills. People treat him the same. But Sara. Sara is like one of those scraps you cut out of magazines and present at the supermarket register, in hopes—a blank coupon, waiting to be redeemed.

People ask, “Is she
OK
out here in the open like this?” when they mean, Is she going to fall down in our store? Their look says
you poor bastard
. “You must be …”

Don’t tell me what I must, or how I am.

They go to the South-side Publix in St. Petersburg, Florida on Thursdays, Bill dresses Sara nicely in his favorite figured silk that didn’t used to be so loose on her and clamps her hand over his elbow like a sheaf of quills so he can lead her to the Graymont van.

If the sky has turned silver and a morning breeze tatters the palm fronds and disturbs the water off the point, he is too intent on his task to see. Let go of her elbow for a minute and Sara will veer, falling off the curb or blundering into the treacherous, springy Bermuda grass where she’ll collapse in the little sigh of air that escapes from under her skirt. It irritates him that she can see these hazards just as plain as he does and walk right into them. Although the others sitting in the van simmer and hiss he takes his time with her, and although he might as well be walking her into a closet or a meat locker for all Sara knows, she smiles at him and gets on. You look up one day to discover the person that you think you know is no longer that person; she’s drifting out to sea, drawn by the tides into an unknown ocean while you stand, helplessly ranting, as she bobs away.

Hesitating in the cereal aisle he tries to return her to the shore of the familiar. “Is it Wheat Chex that we like with bananas or is it Rice Krispies?” A flicker is all he hopes for, anything to remind him who she once was. With his heart thudding he tries heavy lifting: “Oh look, that cereal Willy’s kids used to like so much when they came to our house. Lucky Charms.” My God, she turns and smiles, but he has no way of knowing whether it’s their son’s name or the
Hershey bar he’s given her that makes her face so bright, all shimmering eyes and teeth brown with sweet milk chocolate.

Sara is postverbal. “Oh look,” Bill says, because when they don’t talk it makes you talk too much. “Here are cookies just like the ones we used to have at home.”

That smile goes on like the light in a refrigerator: because you’re looking in. He would put a pillow over her face and have done with it; no, he’d put her into the health center where the nurses want her and move into town but for that radiant, indiscriminate smile.
I’d walk a million miles
… Bill’s memory goes back too far, which is how to your astonishment you end up old. He doesn’t feel like an old guy but he sees it in the way people look at him. Their spot judgments as he sits her down next to him in the movies and plies her with candy to keep her in place, or pretends Sara is choosing the new dresses he buys for her: why are you wasting your time?

Listen. You can bring back even patients who have spent months in a coma through patterning. He’s done a lot of reading about this. Surround them with familiar objects and keep talking and you can teach them just the way a baby learns. You can restore atrophying muscles, you can even reconnect synapses through exercise. Bill has read that through patterning, autistic children can be made to speak and recognize the speaker; they can even learn to hug back, and God, if he gets impatient it is because he still believes if not in happy endings then in convergence, that effort is rewarded and everything you try, no matter how futile it looks to others, has effect.

But when he puts her on the bed and moves her arms and legs in the exercises on the physical therapist’s sheet Sara smiles as if she gets it, and when he stops it’s as if none of this has taken place. It’s like dropping a pebble into deep water; for the moment you disturb the surface. Look back and the last traces are gone.

Deteriorating is a medical name for something you don’t necessarily see from up close. Live with a person and you note without remarking them the increasing degrees of difficulty—things you didn’t used to have to clean up after; that when you’re dressing her—when did you start dressing her?—it’s a little harder to bend that intractable right arm, and without being able to help it you touch your own shriveling face. Sometimes he gets too close and yells; forgive him, sometimes he wants to hit that face, to see it charged with shock, pain, anything but that unalterable, uncomprehending smile.

Exasperated, he shouts, “Sara if you would just.” Come back.

“I, Sinue the Egyptian …” Yes. Wander, forever damned. I will find my lover no matter how far she’s traveled or how completely she’s lost; I will bring her
back even if I have to broach the Nile at ebb tide and scour the putrid hollow where the Pharaoh’s intestines coiled and fill it with spices, earning my freedom in the bowels of the City of the Dead. But he and Sara are like the prisoners at the end of
Land of the Pharaohs
listening as giant stones slide in to seal the pyramid.

Today she does her exercises just the way you tell her, dutifully counting when you count, and if she tugs against you it could just be the mirror image, Sara distracted because whatever she does, she does with her eyes fixed on your face as if you are—not the sun, exactly, but something she needs to watch.

“I thought maybe here.” He coughs and starts over. “I thought if we could just get someplace where you’d have a little help …”

If he agreed to sell the house and move to Florida; if he agreed to buy an apartment at Graymont and eat the goddamned communal evening meal with all those old fuds it was for Sara’s sake—laundry and maid service on Tuesdays and Thursdays at a time when he told himself that was all she really needed, regular meals that spared them both the knowledge that when they sat down to eat at night, if they sat down at all, Sara would have managed boiled chicken breasts. Applesauce from the jar. Two spoons. The move spared them the bleak refrigerator with forgotten ground beef freezer-burned to death and it spared them the sticky floor and overlapping burns on the loose, bleached skin hanging from her wrists. They were also spared—if Sara was still alert enough to respond to things he took to be obvious—her chagrin at the failure, the tears. It’s been a long time since she cried.

Are you still in there?
Whether he begs or shakes, thinking to shock her back into herself, she only blinks and blinks.

Yet at night when he touches her Sara stirs against him as though still in need, and this stops him. It would be like raping a child. He holds her close so he won’t see her incomprehension—no. He holds her close so he won’t have to see the pearly skin incandescing as she smiles at him like a baby at the moon.

Take your vitamins and do your morning exercises. Stay strong, because you are the beacon or is it the Judas goat leading her forward, or are you the torchbearer in the cave? If your light gutters out, she plunges to her death.

After the war he was dispatched to Parris Island; he couldn’t get quarters on the base so Sara stayed in Beaufort, jammed into a studio apartment where their two little girls slept in the window seat. They paid a high school girl to take them to the Saturday movie at the Breeze, and gave her extra to sit through it twice. Try not to bring back the way Sara looked in those days, with her quick, quick mouth and that dark hair.

A month before Bill was discharged a drill sergeant on a night march ordered his platoon of boots into the marsh where currents are swift and the mud can swallow you whole. Marsh shifts and tides can suck the ground out from under you but next to Iwo this was nothing, and if the D.I. was ready to give everything in war, he expected as much of his men in peace. The night was thick and black but orders are orders and by the time the first boot stepped in quicksand, gargling for help, it was too late. Five men were lost. Base personnel were mobilized for a search that went on long after it was clear there was no point; even though he was a supply officer, Bill put on boondockers and flotation gear and waded out.

The next day he staffed the emergency command post, fielding phone calls from the press and marking areas covered on a chart of those waters, and as the first body was found, dispatching a junior officer to break the news to the family. Movement is not action but it gave him the illusion that he was doing something, methodically moving those pins across the grid.

The other bodies were never retrieved. For weeks afterward he couldn’t sleep. In civilian life he would have pulled Sara close and lost himself in her, but she was stacked like a log next to their two girls on the divan in Beaufort, ignorant of most of this, and he was in the rack in the B.O.Q. listening for anything—sirens, shouts, a quickening of the tempo of traffic—anything that would tell him the lost men had been found.

The waters that surround Parris Island are murky and the mud apparently bottomless and Bill already knew as well as the D.I. did what had become of his men. Later the drill instructor would be court martialed and the matter declared closed, but such matters are never closed. Four boys lost out there with their mouths wide and their hair streaming, submerged in mud! Bill still sees them marching in lockstep, blind eyes wide and feet moving in unison, because lost is lost and death is terrible but orders are orders, even in the muck at the deepest part of the channel where strong currents have carried them. Yes he knows better. After all these decades the lost platoon is well and truly dead, and if he cherishes the idea that they crawled ashore on the mainland and spent the rest of their lives
AWOL
, it’s because nobody wants to give up hope for good.

Thank God he was just about to be mustered out of the service. “Oh, Bill,” Sara said, forgetting for once that their own flesh was sleeping on the far side of the veneered coffee table. “This is so terrible.”

Death! Hugging her, he agreed.

Neither of us knew what terrible was.

But in a life without change, or without changes that Bill is willing to admit to, things will sometimes happen. Do. At dinner that night the Advent screen is wheeled into the Graymont dining room so residents and servers can keep track of an approaching storm. This morning it looked like nothing but now it’s an event, which the local weather watch covers like the invasion at Normandy, with advisories and status upgrades and gaudy visual aids, tracing flood tides and the movement of the storm center in contrasting colors on a computer generated map. Dauntless reporters in slickers lean into sheets of rain on thunderous waterfronts to shout for the cameras—bulletins from the front. In the absence of news, weather is news.

From his assigned place at their assigned table Bill watches the
TV
with gratitude because it spares him the nightly responsibility to his assigned tablemates.

New to Florida, some of the residents are worried.

“It’s nothing,” says the overblown woman at the next table, a longtime Floridian whose children put her here. “I’ve survived worse.”

This isn’t good enough for the smart aleck who comes to Bill and Sara’s table in the ersatz captain’s cap. “What’s this place built on, anyway?”

He and the fourth at their table watch Sara with mean, judgmental eyes; they are like crows waiting for the unprotected moment. Let Bill look away for a second and they’ll peck her to death. He hates the smart aleck less than he hates the plump widow who beggars Sara with her lavish flesh, but in a way he is grateful. Without them to push against there would be nothing—no talk, no action, just Sara with her sweet, unremitting smile.

As they leave the dining room a nice old guy just about his age stops him under the canopy. “You have to crack a window on the lee side of the house or the storm makes a vacuum. I’ve seen plate glass windows sucked clean out.” Like Sara, this man’s wife Elsa is postverbal but she’s managed to keep one word. “Blazing blazing blazing blazing.” It is strange and beautiful. “Blazing blazing …”

Patting Elsa’s arm, Bill groans. “I know.” Blazing. Like the skies in the black-and-white
Hurricane
, an entire Polynesian island leveled by the storm, villagers flying like pennants from palm trees until they are torn loose by the wind and swept out to sea.

His heart makes a secret, savage leap. He can almost see it: his life, the present, Sara, everything torn loose and cleansed and blown away and if he is blown out to sea along with her—well.

The last hurricane Bill was this close to was his last week in the service. When the winds died high tides obliterated the perimeters of Parris Island; as is often the case in coastal South Carolina, land and water became one. He and the others paddled inflatable boats up and down Officers’ Row like large children, when he should have been trying to get through to Sara on the mainland to tell her to keep the kids inside. In all he and Sara had three. They had Willy after he was discharged. When Sara told him she was pregnant they made love as if to raise the dead, and Bill was astounded by how easy it was to pick her up and turn her around. Sara had begun by wailing, “What are we going to do?” while in fierce, secret triumph he considered the ledger and made a check mark on the credit side. When he set her down again she was smiling; what had he said? “Love him, I guess.”

“Blazing.”

“I heard you,” Bill says, and with impatient hands hurries Sara past. He always reads the paper to her after dinner. He makes her watch the
TV
evening news.