And Jesse had to ask the question that would have seemed trivial to everyone else in the whole world: “Did she get to eat the abalone?”
“No,” said Annie. “She got to look at them, because there is an abalone farm on the wharf, but the restaurant wasn’t serving any right then. She loved the sand dabs, though.” There was a long silence and then they hung up.
After the service, a week later, Jesse had the box of ashes buried beside his dad’s box, as far as possible from Uncle Frank. His mom hadn’t liked Uncle Frank, thought he had ruined Aunt Minnie’s life.
—
JANET HAD no idea where she picked up the infection. She would have had a little cut, maybe from stepping on a stone or a shard of glass, and then the cellulitis spread from her instep, over the top of her foot, and up the inside of her ankle, at first only red, hardly swollen, but then red, hot, painful, sometimes as if invisible knives were stabbing her. It was Saturday. Eliza, at the knitting shop, made her go up to Seton Medical Center, which was a bit of a drive in the weekend traffic, and she had to cancel the afternoon dog walk (four dogs plus Antaeus), that was forty dollars down the drain. And then the antibiotic, erythromycin, wasn’t cheap, either. The scary part was when the doctor said that if there was no improvement in thirty-six hours she should come back. She did not call her mother, she did not call Jonah, she did not call Emily, because she knew that if she did they would look on the Internet and see what she saw—faces destroyed, legs swollen like homemade sausages, the words “flesh-eating bacteria.”
There was no improvement Tuesday morning, and the doctor, whose name she now knew, Dr. Dalal, changed her antibiotic to doxycycline hyclate. It was very expensive, and the brochure included said that it was used to treat malaria, which somehow made her leg, now swollen to the knee, throb. She was to come back on Thursday if there was no improvement, or, to be safe, even if there was improvement.
There was no improvement. In fact, once she was staring at her leg along with Dr. Dalal, she noticed blisters beginning to form under the skin, and when Dr. Dalal touched the largest of them with her gloved finger (it was maybe the size of a BB), it seemed to open up. Dr. Dalal was sending her to Stanford Health Care by ambulance, thirty miles away. While she was telling Janet this (Janet could not drive, because her infection was in her right leg; best not wait any longer, just to be sure), Janet sat there nodding and throbbing, almost in rhythm, and then she texted Mary to please take charge of Antaeus. (“Sure! You off to somewhere nice?”) When the two nurses helped her to the ambulance, she could hardly put weight on her right foot, even though she had gotten up, made her coffee, and driven to the hospital without much difficulty an hour earlier. Janet hadn’t been to Palo Alto since emptying her house seven years before. She always left the coast through Santa Cruz or Daly City, picturing the ridge that 92 crossed above the Crystal Springs Reservoir as a kind of Berlin Wall that she dared not breach.
The ambulance wasn’t screaming, just transporting. It was the kind with a window, a tricked-out Ford truck, so Janet could see the eucalyptus groves. Normally, she hated eucs and never minded going into a diatribe about why they were the worst possible tree to import to California, but now she appreciated, even loved, the sunlight speckling through the branches, perhaps a sign of mortality. Her leg throbbed the affirmative, and she cried out. “Almost there,” said the EMT—oh, Rob, his name was, right there on his shirt. Was she becoming delirious? One thing that could happen with cellulitis was an overwhelming massive infection, foot to leg to liver to heart to brain to grave. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that another of her conversational themes was that she was old enough to die, sixty-eight. The last thing she wanted to do was end up like her mother. She said that all the time.
They came down the mountain and she lay back, watching the reflection of the reservoir ripple across the ceiling of the ambulance.
And then they were flying down 280, and then there she was, being wheeled into the very emergency room where she had nearly given birth to Jonah, and what was the difference, birth, death, a mere twenty-four years, nothing really, nothing at all.
What was different was that, once she was hooked up to the drip and on some sort of painkiller (she ignored everything the doctor said about which antibiotics and which painkiller they put her on, and so what if they decided she was demented), she actually looked around, first at her room, then out the window at the top of one Norfolk pine, several eucs, and the sky. Those three days here with Jonah she remembered not at all, except the sight of Jonah himself, lanky, cross-eyed, darling as could be. And the sight of her own nipple disappearing into his tiny mouth. When the administrative person (not quite human, but humanlike) came in late in the afternoon and asked for her contact information, she gave him Jared’s name and a phone number that was possibly correct. He handed her her bag; she gave him her Medicare card. She was lucky to have that; soon, the Republicans would be in control and repealing all forms of Socialism. She scowled at the thought and the doctor scuttled out. She was alone in the room, and, she thought, the thing that was giving her reason to live was that view she had seen through the ambulance window of the light at the crest of the mountain, the trees through the ambulance window, something beautiful that had nothing at all to do with Janet Langdon Nelson.
The hours passed eventlessly but strangely, the pain coming and going randomly, the heat in her leg seeming to flow here and there, the certainty in her mind rising and falling about whether she would lose her leg or lose her mind or lose her life. She had no computer, and she discovered, as soon as she got some time to herself, that her phone was dead. All the better. She thought about Lois, though she hadn’t seen her in years and could only imagine her young—younger than she herself was.
Sometime in the middle of the night, she awoke when a nurse was changing her bag. The room seemed hot, and her sheet felt sweaty, and in her half-stupor, she was convinced that they had tied her wrists and ankles to the corners of the bed, that she had been screaming, but she had no memory of any dreams at all. Something came out of her mouth, and the nurse said, “Oh, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up! May I get you some water, or anything? I can help you to the bathroom.”
Janet said, “No, thank you,” and her hands came up and touched the base of her neck, not tied to the bed at all. That was the worst moment, at least in her opinion.
But the doctor’s opinion was different. She might have been lying there, thinking of her old house, trying to calculate exactly how far it was from this bed, or wondering what restaurants were still at the Stanford Shopping Center—was that where she had eaten for the first time at the California Pizza Kitchen—but the doctor said that she had skated on the edge of a real crisis, had she heard of MRSA?
Janet did not say, “Of course”; she only nodded.
Well, she didn’t have that, but he had thought she might. It took forty-eight hours to grow out the pathogen, but after thirty-six, she did seem to be responding to treatment. And now look at her: her leg was still red, but almost back to normal. Get up and walk around a bit, let’s see how your foot feels. Not bad. Thank your immune system; it really drove him bananas the way everyone had turned antibiotics into candy over the last fifty years; he was a vegetarian himself, but what good did it do you? The damage was done. He’d lost a fourteen-year-old boy ten days before, wrestler on the team up in Belmont, lesion on his forearm.
Janet kept quiet. She did not say, “I wouldn’t have minded going instead of him.” It would not have been a lie.
But she was glad when Mary picked her up and drove her home, when Antaeus jumped into her lap and licked her face, when Emily called and asked her why her phone was dead. Four days, not such a long time.
—
LATE IN AUGUST, Jesse got a letter that said that his mortgage had been sold to a company based in Delaware called Piddinghoe Investments. He was given instructions about how to go online and order a payment booklet for his payments. His payments would now b
e due monthly, not, as before, when the harvest was in and sold. He told Jen that had its benefits; he wasn’t going to complain about that. His official level of debt was $356,893—not much, he privately thought, compared with the value of the farm. The letter actually left him feeling not bad. At 5 percent interest, his monthly payment wasn’t even fifteen hundred. He thought that would be no problem; the crop was poor, but 125 bushels an acre would be enough to get them through the year, and the beans, at least, were better off than the corn. He followed instructions, sent off for his booklet, went about everything with his usual method. He also called Northern Iowa Bank and asked to speak to Ralph Coester. Ralph had left, he was told. Taken a job in Chicago. Ted Kugelhaupt was the loan officer now. Jesse had never met Ted Kugelhaupt, or even heard of him. He said he would get back to them. On August 28, he mailed in his payment and forgot about it.
The first foreclosure notice came in mid-November, a week after he sent in his third payment, a week after he sold his crop, a week after he breathed a sigh of relief because the corn yield was 135 bushels even though the weeds had been a nightmare and an eyesore, causing the harvest to last an extra two weeks, a week after the disastrous presidential election (but he was too distracted to care about that). What he would do in the spring he had no idea, since there was no real replacement for glyphosate, and the Monsanto reps were still scarce on the ground. But that was months away. He went to the Piddinghoe Investments Web site and looked through all the options. There was one, “Have a Problem? Contact a representative,” that gave a phone number (877 877-6543), a chat option, and an e-mail option. He tried the phone number three times and never got through to a “banker.” He tried the chat option, and wrote back and forth for a while with “Kathy,” who said that she would look into the issue and get back to him within twenty-four hours. He e-mailed the manager, the repayments department, and the customer representative. Nothing. Finally, he drove into Usherton and spoke to Ted Kugelhaupt, a nondescript thirty-year-old who sucked his lips and nodded his head the whole time Jesse was explaining his problem, then said that the bundle had been sold, two bundles had been sold, that was all he knew about it, there was no recourse through this bank. And he knew nothing about Piddinghoe Investments—had Mr. Langdon sent his checks by registered mail, and had the checks cleared? Yes, they had. Must be a paperwork problem, then, said Ted. He should try that angle. Otherwise, Ted—suck, suck, nod, nod—couldn’t help him. And he didn’t know where Ralph Coester was. Maybe Cleveland? He had heard something about Cleveland. When Jesse got home, he realized that since Northern Iowa Bank had sold the bundles of mortgages the paperwork problem was theirs, but when he tried to call Ted Kugelhaupt back, Ted could not be reached.
It was rather like the week in Vancouver followed by his mother’s death—it took Jesse and Jen a very long time to assimilate what was happening, ten days for them to go from “Maybe we should call a lawyer,” to calling the lawyer, then another five days to get an appointment. The lawyer had another case with stacks of discovery to be done. Better for Jesse to sort through the paperwork that he had in his files, and refrain from paying the December payment, sending along by certified mail a notice seeking all paperwork appertaining to the mortgage. After that, silence. Jen said, “Well, no news is good news.”
They went to D.C. for Christmas. The day they left, Jesse got a letter stating that their “complaint(s) was being looked into. We request your patience.” Guthrie couldn’t go with them because the mall’s busiest season was Christmas, but he promised to come on the 26th. Perky said he would be there, but then his leave was canceled because of the new crisis in Ukraine. They all knew that this might be Uncle Henry’s last Christmas. It turned out that he had had what he called “a mini–heart attack” right around his birthday in October, and only Riley knew about it; even Richie didn’t hear about it until he and Jessica went there for Thanksgiving. Henry wrote everyone a letter saying that he was fine and not to worry; then Richie wrote everyone a letter saying that Henry was not fine, and Christmas in D.C. was the best option. What with deploring Lois’s “accident,” meeting Ezra for the first time, making their way around D.C. in the ice and snow, and trying not to seem alarmed about Uncle Henry, who smiled a lot but never got out of his chair, there were enough spurs for general anxiety. It was difficult enough to relate the tale of Vancouver two times to many oohs and ahs and jeezes: the foreclosure problem seemed to have subsided enough to go unmentioned. The interesting thing was the pile of presents from Andy—they dwarfed the tree. Among them were a new MacBook for Felicity, a new piano for Alexis, a beautiful brown shearling coat for himself, and the most stylish black Gucci boots for Jen that he had ever seen. Felicity allowed as how Andy had requested sizes, and Felicity of course knew them. Felicity said, “She buys all sorts of presents, but she told me the most expensive ones go to the youngest recipients.” That, Jesse thought, explained the piano, which was a baby grand, a Yamaha.
After Christmas, they were stuck in D.C. for an extra two days because of ice, snow, and hail at both O’Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson.
2017
THEY GOT HOME to discover that the propane tank was empty and the house freezing cold—all of Jen’s houseplants were dead, even her favorite, the peace lily. But the propane supplier was there within an hour, and the house was warm by suppertime. They agreed that the death of the plants was a smallish price to pay—if the gas had run out a day later, the tanker truck might never have gotten out of Usherton. The blizzard was another “storm of the century,” except that it really was—thirty-four inches in one twenty-four-hour period, followed by off-and-on accumulations for the next ten days of another twenty inches. Neither Jesse nor Jen was used to being impressed by snowfall. They had seen plenty, especially in the early eighties, and they had heard about even more: Uncle Frank getting out of the second-story window and sliding down a snowdrift on the west side of the old house; tunnels from the house to the barn, where the draft horses and the cows and the chickens huddled in the cold, waiting for three strands of hay and a handful of corn kernels. Oh, yes, popcorn kernels. They made light of it for a few days—the house was warm, no kids to get to school, no problem closing off the upstairs and shutting down those radiators. The house was too large for the two of them, anyway.
The electricity went out, but there were plenty of candles, plenty of books; in France, according to a book Felicity had read, the usual way people got through the winter in the countryside, all the way until the 1950s, had been a sort of hibernation—sleeping from sunset to sunup (some fifteen hours) saved heat and food. For three days, they were really cut off—no Internet, no TV, no recharging the cell phones, no mail. Sun came up after seven-thirty, went down before five—not quite as bad as France. Jen decided to read Middlemarch, and Jesse went through every New Yorker that Felicity had stacked in her room. They ate mostly out of the pantry, put the cuts of meat from the freezer in a box sunk into the snow by the northwest corner of the house, where, in spite of the fluctuation in temperatures, it had a chance of staying chilled. It was Jen’s idea to surround the meat with bags of frozen peas and beans as a gauge. They talked fondly of Lois, who would have cooked every roast and stew the first day before burying them outside—not just survival, but gourmet survival.
The morning after the blizzards had stopped, the electricity came back on and the road was finally plowed. The full results of the November election still weren’t announced; after eight years of Obama, everyone was certain there’d be a Republican sweep, and it looked like the Senate and House were going dramatically in that direction. But even the presidential tally wasn’t in. Because of the twenty-three-state Election Day power outage, there was no telling how many votes were lost, or worse. Rumors abounded that the grid had been hacked, since the polar vortex alone could not have caused the complete electrical shutdown—in, say, Los Angeles.
There was a knock on the door. It was Sheriff—what was his name?—Bill Jenks, standing on the front porch. Jesse t
hought that there must be some disaster, that the county was sending people out to see if everyone was okay, so he opened the door with a smile, and Sheriff Jenks handed him a paper: Request for a donation? Tickets to some fund-raiser? But it was a copy of a notice of sale, and the property being sold was this very farm—Jesse recognized the parcel number. Sheriff Jenks said, “Shoulda given you this ten days ago, but no one could get here. You can appeal that, and put off the date.” The sale date on the paper was February 1. Jesse didn’t say anything, he was so thunderstruck. Sheriff Jenks handed him a pen, and for a moment Jesse thought of refusing to sign, but he did sign—intimidated by the uniform, no doubt. Sheriff Jenks said, “Well, then,” and made his way carefully down the icy steps and over to his vehicle, which still had three inches of snow frozen on the roof. But the sky was clear, brilliantly clear, almost blinding, in every direction.
Jen was in the kitchen, enjoying the hot water, humming to herself. He set the paper beside the sink and walked out the back door. It was freezing cold and he didn’t feel a thing, he was so enraged. Moments later, the door slammed open behind him, and Jen said, “Is this what I think it is?”
“If you and I both think it is a notice of foreclosure, sale, and eviction, then we agree on what it probably is.”
“How can that happen?”
“I think the real question is, how can it happen this fast, without any response from goddamned Piddinghoe Investments, or the bank.”
“Can we get into town?”
“Not until Monday.” It was Thursday. “There’s no point going tomorrow, because the state and county offices are on four-day weeks. I’m not sure we would get there tomorrow, anyway. The sheriff’s car had chains. We don’t know what the roads are like.” Jesse called the lawyer there, but there was no answer.