Was I missing out on something, living this way? Where would I be now if I’d have taken the fellowship in Ireland? What would I be studying, how would I fill my days? There were so many times I wanted to correct the counselors here for mispronouncing easy scientific terms, dumbing down processes until they were basically incorrect, mixing up easy genetic markers for certain ailments. And yet I couldn’t say a word—I was simply an assistant with no rights. A cruel thought occurred to me: Perhaps this was what my mother felt like, before she left us. Stifled like this, compromised, angry that she wasn’t living her life according to exactly what she wanted. But as soon as I thought it, I felt so guilty and small. So I wasn’t doing earth-shattering research. I could be doing a lot worse.
The dogs followed me as I walked through the apartment I grew up in, sifting through my father’s big leather box of receipts and tickets and take-out menus and Post-its and packing slips. I read a few again. Today, there are only two pigeons sitting on the ledge across the street. Yesterday, there were three. What did they do to the other one?
What had my father alluded to in the hospital, during that bad ECT treatment? I’ve hidden something from you, he’d said—or something like that, anyway. Would it unlock why this had happened to him, who he was—or was it ridiculous to think that way? I wandered into his closet and stared at the button-down shirts and blazers he’d left behind. Some of them were moth-eaten or out of style; he’d have to buy new things, if he was considering going back to work. Some of my mother’s clothes were still in there, too, relics of the late eighties and nineties. Three black dresses from Ann Taylor. A suit from Brooks Brothers with shoulder pads. Some pink blouses, a light gray cashmere sweater. I pressed in the rivets of a pair of pale blue jeans. I’d never thought to look through my mother’s pockets before—I hadn’t thought she was the type to leave things in there. But I found a faded receipt stuffed into the fifth pocket, the purple ink still crisp and legible, for a dozen donuts from the bakery down the street. My mother used to have to go to the bakery and buy them for my father because he had an inexplicable fear of standing in the bakery line.
And there was a business card in the next pocket for Karen Keyes, MSW. I’d never heard my mother mention anyone named Karen Keyes. The items appeared staged, like someone had snuck in and filled my mother’s pockets, planting the seeds, waiting for me to uncurl the mystery.
I didn’t know how much later it was that the phone rang. I let it go to the answering machine, expecting to hear Alex’s voice again—he’d already called several times, but I hadn’t had the energy to talk. Instead, my father’s voice floated out. “Summer? Are you there?”
I leapt up and ran across the bedroom to grab the extension. “Dad?” I gasped it out, like he was a ghost I’d just encountered around a corner. “Why are you calling me?”
“No reason,” he said. “I just wanted to call. To talk.”
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry about our last visit.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just felt like it was…weird.”
Silence followed. “It was fine,” he said.
I stared out the window blankly, my heart beating so fast it felt it might rip out of my body. A tugboat skidded down the East River, cars zoomed up the FDR.
“You want me to be happy, right?” my father asked, sounding almost afraid.
I cupped my hand over the head of one of the dogs. “Of course I want you to be happy. That’s a silly question. Why would you ask that?”
“I just wanted to make sure.”
“I want you to come back to Brooklyn,” I said quickly. “I’m excited that you feel better. I hope that you didn’t misunderstand me, when we visited. I was just surprised, is all. We just haven’t talked that much, and—”
“I know, Summer,” he interrupted. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”
The sun broke through a cloud, sending splendorous light across the faces of the buildings across the water. I felt wonderful. He still cared about me. And he was coming home. He was better. The dogs would be ecstatic. They’d remember him immediately—they’d bowl him over and lick his face. We could go to the park and let them swim in the lake and buy each of them a hot dog from the cart.
I was about to tell him that I thought he’d been acting strangely lately, and how I’d felt a little left out, maybe, a little excluded from his life, but it was okay now because he was coming back, because we would know everything about each other again. But then my father coughed. “Summer, I’ve met someone.”
The air conditioner kicked on, sending a cold blast down my back. “Pardon?”
“I met someone.” His words came out rushed. “Someone I think I’ve fallen in love with.”
There were a lot of people out on the Promenade. Two little girls in frilly dresses ran down the length of the walkway, scuffing up their shoes.
“Her name’s Rosemary,” my father galloped on. “I met her here. She’s an aide.” He swallowed something noisily on the other end of the line. “She’s really helped me. She’s been an amazing friend. I wanted to tell you when you visited, but there wasn’t time. The movie ended sooner than I thought.”
I looked at my left hand. I had been pressing my nails into my palm so hard, there were four white half-moons in my skin.
“I’m coming back to Brooklyn in two weeks,” my father said. “I—we—decided today. I’ve asked her to come with me.”
I laughed. “What, as your nurse?” It just slipped out.
A stiff silence followed.
“I’m sorry,” I backpedaled. “I just…I don’t quite understand. This is all a little sudden. I mean, what, you couldn’t have met this person—she’s, what, an aide?—more than a month ago, right? That’s the last time we really talked. Don’t you think it’s a little soon?”
His voice was low. “Well, I met her almost a year ago.”
I went limp.
“I didn’t want to say anything to you until I was certain. My new therapist, Walter? He thinks it’s wonderful. He really supports us, and thinks what we’re doing is perfectly healthy.”
“Healthy?”
“You’ll really like her. She’s very kind.”
“Did I already meet her?” I demanded. “Was she there at Christmas?”
He was quiet for a moment. “Yes, she was. She helped cook the dinner.”
I had spent so much time passing judgment on the patients—the anorexic girl who wouldn’t stop petting Wesley, the grandmotherly woman who worked a jigsaw puzzle of kittens in a basket. I thought they had been the ones to watch.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Okay. Well, wow. Huh. I don’t exactly know what to say.”
“How about that it’s great? How about that you’re happy for me?”
“No, it is great. Really.” I didn’t know how to word this. “You’ve been in the hospital, Dad. For a long time. I think…”
“You think what? That because I’ve been here, I’ve…I’ve turned into a child? That I don’t understand relationships? That I’m not worthy of anyone loving me back?”
“I didn’t mean that at all!” Tears of surprise burned my eyes.
“That’s what it sounds like. You assume these things about me, Summer, and I’ve lived with it long enough that maybe I assume them about myself. But I’m not that way. You don’t even know.”
It hurt, like a pickaxe driving into my side.
“What?”
“This is my chance at being happy. I need a chance to grow, Summer. I had that here, and I don’t want it to end. I need a chance to live my life, and you need a chance to live yours. There’s enough room for all of us in that big apartment, don’t you think?”
The sentiment was so familiar. “I’m keeping you from living your life?”
He let out a frustrated breath. “I have to go. Someone else needs the phone.”
And then he just hung up. I stared at the receiver, th
e dial tone like a siren. I tried to call back. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. Something hit me then: everything he said, especially his retorts, seemed like it’d been rehearsed, like he’d traced it over and over in his brain, committing it to memory, knowing that if he didn’t get it out quickly and word for word, he wouldn’t be able to say anything at all. I had never heard him speak so eloquently or succinctly about his feelings, especially if they might hurt someone else. Usually he stumbled, backtracked, realized what he was trying to get out much, much later.
It made me feel both proud and horrible at the same time. He had, it seemed, truly turned a corner. But at the same time, it also meant my father had possibly sat in this new therapist’s office and discussed how certain people in his life were preventing him from growing as a person. Maybe he’d prepared for when he would break the news, make his feelings known.
An unidentifiable feeling fluttered deep, but I didn’t allow it to surface. I’ll make dinner, I thought, standing up. I opened the fridge. Eggs. No cheese or butter. Grapes, a wilted head of lettuce. Some milk and some Diet Coke. When I looked around, the apartment was the same as it was just minutes ago, before I’d answered the phone. The bedspread still rumpled. The dogs still muddy. I breathed carbon dioxide out, plants sucked it in. Everything I took for granted still acted as it should. Almost everything.
I thought about my father and this new woman coming back to the apartment. Maybe he’d carry her over the threshold, stamping happily down the hallway to his old bedroom. I’d begun sleeping in his giant bed, the twinkling skyline as my night-light. I was glad for my father, that the darkness around him had lightened, but I wasn’t particularly glad for myself. The emotion was sore and embarrassing. I no longer had any idea what my place was. I couldn’t bear to think of climbing into my old bed, pulling up the heavy pink quilt I’d always secretly hated.
And then there was the phone call I received a few days later, when coming home from work. A woman identified herself as a nurse from St. Geraldine’s Hospital in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania. She said that Stella Rogers had been in a car accident. Could I come by the hospital and pick her up? Stella was fine, but she wasn’t in any condition to drive.
I started laughing. I told them I was in Brooklyn, New York—perhaps they could call someone who lived closer? The nurse on the phone said that I was Miss Roger’s in-case-of-emergency contact—the only in-case-of-emergency contact. Stella had demanded they call me.
I was looking for an excuse to leave. I packed some things and took a cab to La Guardia. The next flight to Pittsburgh was on American. I walked up to the counter and bought a ticket. The plane was boarding in a half hour.
When I got to the hospital, Stella was sitting on a hospital bed, watching television. I gasped when I saw her. I didn’t even try and mask it. She looked like she’d lost about forty pounds and aged a hundred years since I’d last seen her six years earlier. The first thing she told me was she had just watched the 2000 Summer Olympics Women’s Triathlon. “I think I might do a triathlon,” she said. “I used to be quite a swimmer in my day.” I glanced at the old woman sleeping in the bed next to hers. There was a tube in her nose and a wheelchair next to her bed. Stella rolled her eyes. “That’s Agnes,” she whispered. “She’s pathetic.”
The hospital gave me papers to sign, and then the doctor came to speak to me. He was so tall he had to stoop through doorways, and he had large, fingernail-shaped teeth. He said the reason Stella came in here—her car accident—was nothing. The problem, however—and he bent down to tell me this—was when she said that, as long as she was already here, she might as well mention the blood in her stool. And that she was—he twisted up his lips when he said this—“defecating up a storm.” I had a feeling Stella would have used a more colorful word for defecating.
“The red flags went up for me, just looking at her,” the doctor said. “So I ordered a colonoscopy. I’m glad I did, considering.”
He finally told me that Stella had locally advanced colon cancer. They had taken blood samples and biopsies. God knows what they told Stella to get her to prep for the colonoscopy. The tumor was localized in her rectum, the doctor said, but perhaps not localized enough. It may have spread through the colon wall and possibly into her lymph nodes. This type of cancer was curable, but only if caught quickly. If it were up to him, he would get her in here to start treatment immediately.
I laughed. I thought of my father and this new woman, Rosemary, preparing to come back to Brooklyn. I thought of Alex, of Steven, even of Claire Ryan. They were living their own lives, simply, right now eating potato chips straight out of a bag, walking a dog, watching a baseball game, buying something on the Internet.
I drove Stella home in my rental because her car had been towed. I didn’t know what to say to her; I hardly knew her. Halfway to her house, Stella turned to me and said, “That doctor of mine is cute, isn’t he? Do you want me to give him your phone number?”
“What, my number in New York?” I snapped.
“Oh, you were dying to come,” she said, putting her hand over mine and squeezing. For a moment I was afraid that she knew really, truly, why I was here.
Stella navigated me back to the old house on the gravelly road. I felt like I was falling into a billowing dream. The tire swing had fallen off its tether and was now lying on the ground beneath the tree. Next door was the Elkerson house. Down the street was Philip’s house, but it was too dark to really see it. A buzzing glow filled my stomach—surely he wasn’t still living there. I was terrified to find out—if he was, that would be disappointing, pathetic. But if he wasn’t, it would be equally disappointing, just for different reasons.
Stella opened the flimsy, rusting screen door. A strange smell wafted out—a mix of mildew and plug-in air fresheners. “Are you coming?” she asked me.
I stood next to the handprint my father had put into the front walk’s cement. Richard, it said, in very straight, neat letters. I could have stopped the arc of what was happening. I could have called someone, a caretaker, a nurse, hospice. The little I knew of Stella, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be easy to cajole her into months of surgery and treatment—the doctors had said, for instance, that she may end up needing a colostomy bag. It wouldn’t even be easy to get her to admit there was anything wrong with her. I looked up at her in the door. Stella wore a shrunken neon blue T-shirt underneath her hooked cardigan that said Diva in sparkly rhinestones across the chest. She mentioned she was thinking of starting a website. I pictured a dark, noxious mass inside her, sitting on top of her bowel the way a kid perches on top of a carousel horse.
I stared at my bags. I had packed enough clothes. The dogs were at a kennel called the Doggie Day Spa, the only one my father said they could go to if I had to travel anywhere, because the ratio of dogs to daycare workers was four to one. Maybe being a caretaker was inscribed into the very fiber of me, meaning that if I looked at myself under a microscope, this was exactly what each of my individual cells would say. Why else was I always finding myself in these situations? Perhaps in Cobalt I could succeed, where elsewhere I had failed. I wasn’t here because of fear or anger. I was here because of, well, scientific destiny.
In the year between then and now, Stella and I would get to know each other through our habits. I would take comfort in her banal routines: her morning hour and a half of primping, the copious amount of sugar in her tea. I would relish the more significant moments, too. We would walk along the creek bed, cutting through Philip’s old backyard—his family had moved after all, just a few years after my grandmother had died. We would stumble upon the bird graves Philip had shown me years ago. The headstones would be washed clean by rain, and the handwriting on the tiny slabs would be so hauntingly, painfully familiar. Neither Stella nor I would say anything, but we both, in our own ways, would know who’d buried most of the birds there, long before Philip was born.
I would learn that she couldn’t go to bed without watching the lottery, even thoug
h neither of us played—she simply liked the way the ping-pong balls blew around to and fro. And that she loved her dogs desperately, and gave each dog a song. She was like my father in that way, in many ways. She would tell me many stories about her husband, Skip, sometimes full of confessions, but I would never confess anything back. In the year since I came, Stella would ask only once what my Dad was up to, and I would answer, “Oh, he’s doing his thing.” She wouldn’t delve further. There would be a lot of things I wouldn’t ask her—if she was angry this had happened to her. If she asked why. If she was afraid. The closest we would get to a conversation about heaven was the time I found out that Stella believed the afterlife was an episode of The Price Is Right. Those who lived fair lives would be able to come on down the aisle and play the pricing games with Bob Barker, those who were very good got to climb up on the stage and play Plinko and the shell game and Cliff Hangers and spin the big wheel, and those who were criminals or pedophiles or sold drugs to children got to sit in the audience, waiting for the rest of eternity for Rod Roddy to call their names. When I would ask her what she thought she’d get to do in the Price Is Right Afterlife, she would reply, “Oh, I might not be in the Showcase Showdown, but I’d definitely get to spin the wheel.”
Maybe I knew all this was coming, standing there in Stella’s gravel driveway, still fresh off the plane from New York. Maybe I convinced myself that she needed me instead of admitting what I couldn’t bear to think about back home. Whatever the case, I swallowed hard, lifted my bags, and threw them over my shoulder. Stella’s old dogs regarded me tiredly; none of them got up. “I’m coming,” I said. Of course I was.
twenty
The Cobalt Wal-Mart parking lot was packed with Saturday shoppers. Samantha parked her Mercedes in one of the very back spaces to avoid any potential parking lot accident—“Look at the way some of these people are taking up three spaces!” she cried. “In an enormous pick-up truck, no less!” I unfolded Stella’s wheelchair from the cavernous back area and helped her into it.