Noah's Compass

  It was this thought that made him come to his senses, finally. Not for the first time, he wondered if the blow to his head had somehow affected his sanity. He gave himself a little shake; he wiped his damp face on his shirt sleeve. Then he started the car and, after one last glance at the door (still closed), he pulled out into traffic and drove home.

  Barbara called on Saturday morning and said she wanted to come get Kitty. “I’ll stop by for her in, say, half an hour,” she said. “Around ten or so. Is she still asleep?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Well, wake her up and tell her to pack. I’ve got a busy day today.”

  “Okay, Barbara. How have you been?” Liam asked, because he felt a little hurt that she hadn’t inquired about his injuries.

  But she just said, “Fine, thanks. Bye,” and hung up.

  He would be sorry to see Kitty go, in some ways. Having another person around was oddly cheering. And unlike her two sisters, who seemed to adopt a tone of high dudgeon whenever they talked to him, Kitty often behaved as if she might actually enjoy his company.

  On the other hand, it would be good to have his own bed back. He noticed when he stuck his head in to wake her that already the room had taken on her scent—various perfumed cosmetics mingling with the smell of worn clothing—and it was strewn with far more possessions than could have fit into that one duffel bag, surely. Bottles and jars covered the bureau; T-shirts littered the floor; extension cords trailed from the outlets. The bed itself was shingled with glossy magazines. He didn’t know how she could sleep like that.

  “Kitty, your mother will be here in half an hour,” he said. “She’s coming to take you home.”

  Kitty was just a feathery tousle of hair on the pillow, but she said, “Mmf,” and turned over, so he felt it was safe to leave her.

  He laid out breakfast: toasted English muffins and (against his principles) the Diet Coke she always claimed she needed to get her going. For himself he brewed coffee. He was starting on his second cup, seated at the table watching the English muffins grow cold, before she emerged from the bedroom. She still had her pajamas on, and a crease ran down one cheek and her hair was sticking up every which way. “What time is it?” she asked, pulling out her chair.

  “Almost ten. Do you have your things packed?”

  “No,” she said. “Hello-o, did anyone warn me? All at once I’m yanked out of bed and told I’m being evicted.”

  “I guess it’s the only time your mother can come,” Liam said. He helped himself to an English muffin. “She said she had a busy day today.”

  “So she couldn’t inform me ahead? Maybe ask me if it was convenient?”

  Kitty popped the tab on her Diet Coke and took a swig. Then she stared moodily down at the can. “I don’t know why she wants me back anyway,” she said. “We’re not getting along at all.”

  “Well, everybody has their ups and downs.”

  “She’s this, like, rule-monger. Nitpicker. If I’m half a minute late it’s, whoa, grounded forever.”

  “I would have supposed,” Liam said, picking his way delicately between words, “that she would be less concerned with all that now that she has a … boyfriend, did you say?”

  “Howie,” Kitty said. “Howie the Hound Dog.”

  “Hound dog!”

  “He has these droopy eyes, like this,” Kitty said, and she pulled down her lower lids with her index fingers till the pink interiors showed.

  Liam said, “Heh, heh,” and waited to hear more, but Kitty just reached for the butter.

  “So, are they … serious, do you suppose?” Liam asked finally.

  “How would I know?”

  “Ah.”

  “They go to these movies at the Charles that all the artsy people go to.”

  “I see.”

  “He has permanent indigestion and can’t eat the least little thing.”

  Liam said, “Tsk.” And then, after a pause, “That must be hard for your mother. She’s such an enthusiastic cook.”

  Kitty shrugged.

  This was the first boyfriend Liam had heard about since Madigan died—Barbara’s second husband. He had died of a stroke several years ago. Liam had always viewed Madigan as temporary, ersatz, a mere substitute husband; but in fact Madigan had been married to Barbara longer than Liam himself had, and it was Madigan who had occupied the Father of the Bride role at Louise’s wedding. (Everything but the actual walking her down the aisle; that much they had oh-so-graciously allowed Liam.) At Madigan’s funeral the girls had shed more tears than they ever would for Liam, he would bet.

  “I’m just thankful your Grandma Pennywell didn’t live to see your mother marry Madigan,” he told Kitty. “It would have broken her heart.”

  “Huh?”

  “She was very fond of your mother. She always hoped we’d reconcile.”

  Kitty sent him a look of such blank astonishment that he said, hastily, “But anyhow! Shouldn’t you be packing?”

  “I’ve got time,” Kitty said. And even though the doorbell rang at the very next instant, she continued licking butter off each finger in a catlike, unhurried way.

  Before he could get all the way to the door, Barbara walked on in. She wore a Saturday kind of outfit—frumpy, wide slacks and a T-shirt. (No doubt she would have dressed differently for what’s-his-name. For Howie.) She was carrying a lidded plastic container and a cellophane bag of rolls. “How’s the head?” she asked, striding right past him.

  “Nobody seems to inquire about it anymore,” he said sadly.

  “I just did, Liam.”

  “Well, it’s better. It doesn’t ache, at least. But I still can’t remember what happened.”

  “When do you get the stitches out?”

  “Monday,” he said. He was disappointed that she had ignored the reference to his failed memory. “I’m hoping maybe when I’m sleeping in my own bed again, it will all come back to me. Do you think?”

  “Maybe,” Barbara said absently. She was putting the container in his refrigerator. “This is homemade vegetable soup for your lunch. Where’s Kitty?”

  “She must be packing. Thanks for the soup.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Guess what Julia brought: beef stew.”

  “Ha!” Barbara said. But he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She said, “How late did Kitty stay out nights?”

  Liam didn’t have time to answer (not that he’d have been able to, since he was generally sound asleep when Kitty got home) before Kitty called from the bedroom, “I heard that!”

  “I was only wondering,” Barbara said.

  “Then why don’t you ask me?” Kitty said. She appeared in the hallway, struggling under the weight of her duffel bag, which was bulging open, too full to zip. “Typical,” she told Liam. “She’s always going behind my back. She doesn’t trust me.”

  Liam said, “Oh, now, I’m sure that’s not—”

  “Darn right I don’t trust you,” Barbara said. “Who was it who changed my bedroom clock that time?”

  “That was months ago!”

  “She snuck into my room before she went out and set my clock an hour behind,” Barbara told Liam. “I guess she thought I wouldn’t notice when I went to bed. I’d wake in the night and look at the clock and think she wasn’t due back yet.”

  Liam said, “Surely, though—”

  “Oh, why do you always, always take her side against me?” Barbara demanded.

  “When have I taken her side against you?”

  “You don’t even know what happened! You just jump on in with both feet!”

  “All I said was—”

  “Do you have a grocery bag?” Kitty asked him. “I’ve got way too much stuff.”

  She made it sound as if he were somehow to blame for that. In fact he felt blamed by both of them. He went over to a kitchen cupboard and pulled out a flattened paper bag and handed it to her in silence.

  As soon as Kitty left the room, he turned to Barbara and said
, “Shall we sit down?”

  “I’m really pressed for time,” Barbara said. But she followed him into the living room and settled in the rocker. He sat across from her. He laced his fingers together and smiled at her.

  “So!” he said. Then, after a pause, “You’re looking well.”

  She was, Saturday clothes or no. She had that fair, clean skin that showed to best advantage without makeup, and her serenely folded hands—the nails cut sensibly short and lacking any sort of polish—struck him as restful. Reassuring. He went on smiling at her, but she had her mind elsewhere. She said, “I’m getting too old for this.”

  “Pardon?”

  “For dealing with teenage girls.”

  “Well, yes, you are a little old,” Liam said.

  This caused Barbara to give a short laugh, but he was only speaking the truth. (She’d had Kitty at age forty-five.)

  “It wasn’t so bad with Louise,” she said. “Say what you will about the born-again thing; at least it made her an easy adolescent. And Xanthe I don’t even count. Xanthe was such a good girl.”

  Thank heaven for that much, Liam thought, since Xanthe wasn’t her own. Wouldn’t he have felt guilty if Xanthe had given Barbara any trouble! But she had been so docile—a quiet, obedient three-year-old when Barbara first met her. He’d brought her along to work one morning when his childcare fell through, and the two of them had hit it off at once. Barbara hadn’t fussed over her or used that fake, high, cooing voice that other women used or expected Xanthe to rise to any particular level of enthusiasm. She seemed to understand that this child had a low-key nature. And she’d already known that about Liam. She certainly knew he was low-key.

  So why did she want more than that after they were married? Why did she prod him, and drag him to counseling, and at last, in the end, give up on him?

  Women had this element of treachery, Liam had discovered. They entered your life under false pretenses and then they changed the rules. Underneath, Barbara had turned out to be just like all the others.

  Take today, for instance. Look at her sitting in his rocking chair. Although she had started out so calm—hands folded in her lap—she grew more restless by the minute. First she picked up an issue of Philosophy Now from the floor beside her and examined the cover. Then she set it down and looked around the room, knitting her eyebrows in such a way that Liam felt himself becoming defensive. He sat up straighter. She turned her gaze on him and said, “Liam, I wonder if you might perhaps be a little bit depressed.”

  “Why on earth would you say that?” Liam asked.

  Why did she feel she had the right to say it, was what he meant. But she misread the question. She said, “Because you’re narrowing your world so. Haven’t you noticed? You’re taking up a smaller and smaller space. You don’t have a separate kitchen anymore or a fireplace or a view from your window. You seem to be … retreating.”

  Luckily, Kitty came into the room just then. She was lugging not just the grocery bag but a pillowcase stuffed with clothing—the pillowcase from Liam’s bed, which she hadn’t asked permission to take. “Here,” she told her mother, and she dropped the pillowcase in Barbara’s lap and then bent to pick up her duffel bag.

  “What is all this?” Barbara asked as she struggled to her feet. “How did you end up with so many belongings?”

  “It’s not my fault! You’re the one who sent me here!”

  “Did I tell you to bring your whole closet? Where did all this come from?”

  “I had to buy a couple of extra things,” Kitty said.

  “What? With what money?” Barbara demanded.

  Meanwhile they were limping toward the door, hampered by their burdens, yawping at each other like two blue jays. Liam saw them out with a feeling of relief. After they were gone he returned to his chair and sank into it. The silence was so deep it almost echoed. He was alone again.

  Monday morning his stitches were removed. A patch of thin gray fuzz hid the scar now. He went to the barber the following day and had his hair cut even shorter than usual, and after that the patch was nearly unnoticeable.

  On his palm, the stitches left puckers. They turned the deepest of the creases there into a sort of ruffle. He wondered if this would be permanent. He sat in his rocker staring down at his palm for minutes on end.

  He had too much time to fill; that was the truth of the matter. For a brief while, the fuss of moving in had entertained him—arranging and rearranging his books, scouring three different kitchen stores for the exact type of wall-mounted can opener he was used to in the old place. But that couldn’t last forever. And with no summer school now, no papers to grade, no ten-year-old boys in despair over the inconsistencies of i-before-e … well, face it, he was bored. He could sit and read for only so many hours. He could take only so many walks. Of course he could always listen to classical music on his clock radio, but it seemed to him that the station kept playing the same pieces, and most of the pieces sounded like the music they played at the circus. Besides: just sitting, just listening, just staring straight ahead with his hands resting on his kneecaps, was not enough to use up the day.

  Nobody called to ask how he was. Not Barbara, not his sister, not any of his daughters. Here he thought he and Kitty had gotten on so well, but he didn’t hear a word from her.

  The hospital sent him a bill for expenses not covered by his health insurance. They charged him rent for a phone in his room, and he was able to consume quite a large chunk of one morning on a protest call to Accounting.

  “Not that I wouldn’t have liked a phone in my room,” he said. “I certainly asked for one. I had no way of getting in touch with my family and letting them know where I was. Everybody was needlessly worried.”

  The woman at the other end of the line allowed a silence to develop after each one of his statements. He hoped this meant she was writing down his words, but he suspected she was not. “Hello?” he said. “Are you there?”

  Another silence. Then, “Mmhmm.”

  “Also,” he said, “this bill was for three days. For June tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. But I was unconscious on the tenth! How do they think I was able to order a phone when I was unconscious?”

  “A visitor could have ordered it,” she said after another pause.

  “I didn’t have any visitors.”

  “How do you know that, if you were unconscious?”

  This last remark came lickety-split, no pause at all, triumphantly. He sighed. He said, “I don’t think I had even made it into my room on the tenth. I think I was still in emergency. And meanwhile my family was completely in the dark, wondering what had become of me.”

  It almost seemed like the truth. He imagined relatives all over town wringing their hands and calling around and checking with the police.

  But the woman in Accounting was unimpressed. She told him they would get back to him later. Her tone of voice implied that it wasn’t going to be uppermost on anyone’s agenda.

  At nighttime he slept poorly, no doubt because he wasn’t tired. He was bothered by the faint scent of Kitty’s shampoo even though he had changed the sheets, and a neighbor’s TV was so loud that percussive thumping noises vibrated one wall. When he did finally sleep, he dreamed dreams that exhausted him—complicated narratives that he had to work to keep track of. He dreamed he was a pharmacist advising a customer about her medications, but while he was talking he absentmindedly, unintentionally ate every one of her pills. He dreamed he was leading a policewoman through his apartment—not the woman who had visited in real life but another one, old and crabby—and while they were in the bedroom they heard a sound from the window. “There!” Liam said. “Didn’t I tell you?” He was pleased, because in the dream there seemed to be some suspicion that he had made the intruder up. Then he woke, and for an instant he thought that the sound from the window had been real. His heart seemed to stop; he felt suddenly cold, although it was a warm night. But almost immediately, he understood that he had imagined it. The only sounds were the
meep-meep of tree frogs, the neighbor’s TV, the distant rush of traffic on the Beltway. He was surprised that he’d felt such terror. Why should he be afraid? Everybody dies sometime. In fact he was almost waiting to die. But evidently his body had other ideas.

  His heartbeat returned to normal and the chill faded, and he was left with a feeling of disappointment. Wouldn’t you think that that flash of alarm could have jogged his memory?

  He had no idea when Cope Development opened for business each day, and so he drove downtown extra early—shortly after eight o’clock. A panel truck occupied the space where he’d parked the last time. He drew up directly behind it, in front of the Mission for Indigent Men. He cut the engine and rolled down his window and prepared himself for a wait.

  Within minutes, a woman approached from the other direction, hunting through a red tote as she walked. She brought forth a bunch of keys and climbed the front steps, unlocked the door, and disappeared inside. But no others followed. Maybe this woman was the office manager, or opener, or whatever the term was. The sidewalk remained empty. Liam began to feel deeply, maddeningly bored. His throat developed a hollow ache from holding back his yawns. His face grew sticky with perspiration.

  Then around nine o’clock, people started arriving—young men in suits, and women of all ages strolling in twos and threes, talking as they entered the building, laughing and nudging each other. Liam felt a pang of nostalgia for the easy camaraderie of people who worked together.

  A man in coveralls walked past Liam’s car, climbed into the parked panel truck, and drove away. Immediately afterward, as if by prearrangement, a dingy green Corolla pulled into the vacant space. A woman stepped out from the driver’s side: the rememberer. She was wearing another big, folksy skirt, or perhaps the same one, for all Liam knew, and her ringlets were wet-looking now from the heat. She circled behind her car, so close that he could hear the slogging sound of her sandals on the pavement. She opened the front passenger door, and Mr. Cope unfolded himself from his seat and stood upright. He had that old-person knack of remaining cool in sweltering weather. His hatchet face was dry and chalky; his high white collar and close-fitting suit were still crisp.