JAMES and Rosie went to visit Charles. He was lying in bed dozing when they arrived, pale as could be, as if the vampire of life had sucked out all his blood. It made his hair appear darker than usual. James pointed to a chair near the bed for Rosie and pulled up the wheelchair for himself. These quiet sounds woke Charles, and he stared off into the distance before noticing he had company. “Hello,” he said, soft as light.
Rosie looked on the verge of sneezing, and she tried to smile and to imagine what her mother would do.
“Hey, handsome,” she said, pigeon-toed, chewing on her baby finger.
“Rosie. You should be outside on a day like this, not cooped up inside with a sick old man.”
“This was Rosie’s idea,” said James.
“Mommy’s going to meet us here,” said Rosie, braiding her bangs.
Charles closed his eyes. Please, Mommy, prayed Rosie, please come right now. All she could smell was too much soap over the smell of something going bad in the refrigerator. She remembered swimming with him so many times, his trim old washboard body in navy blue shorts, him taking her to his club, throwing her into the Russian River when she was small. She remembered clamoring onto his back in the river, holding on like a drowning cat, holding her breath as he dove underneath the surface and swam around like a dolphin. She vaguely remembered nearly drowning once, but that was with her daddy, and she was only three or so, and what she remembered was being under the water, and the sun trickling through so that it all shone, and she remembered closing her eyes, and then opening them with her daddy blowing air into her, his mouth almost completely covering her face, and how her chest had felt it would burst, and how he’d cried when she opened her eyes. And she remembered hiking all those times with Charles, up on the mountain, how he always brought salami, how sometimes Grace used to come along and slow them down but made him so happy, and sometimes it was just Rosie and Charles, and maybe sometimes Elizabeth, but not always. And how he brought himself one beer to drink when they stopped for lunch, and one Coke for her. And he always had awful cookies, fig bars or perforated raisin flats, but sometimes he brought beef jerky, which she loved, and beer nuts. He was so patient, so calm.
And sitting there listening to James discuss his work, Elizabeth’s garden, whatever, so much sadness welled up in Rosie because Charles was going to die soon that she felt her heart collapse inward. She tried to keep the tears from spilling over by widening her eyes alarmingly, while the men kept talking, blah blah blah, and her face was burning and she blinked like mad and tried to get old tennis matches to play in her head, but even though her eyes were as wide open as they would go, the tears pooled and dripped down onto her face. She got up, smiling like mad, like a crazy person. In a silent vacuum she saw James and Charles staring at her, but no one made a move. She escaped, hurrying down the hall like a hamster, into the bathroom.
She sat on the toilet for a while.
After some time she washed her face with cold water and tried to go back down the hall, but the tears started again, and she ducked back into the bathroom. She sobbed in absolute silence. Then she sat for a while and replayed long and specific rallies in her head, imagining her father watching her, marveling at her skill, Andrew with his wonderful long legs and beautiful quiet eyes, silently cheering her on, and then in his place she saw James on the sidelines, leaping up to go check his message machine, her mother staring off into space as if hearing distant melodies, her pro on the East Coast with the boys who were national champions. Leaning against the wall of Charles’s bathroom, staring at the screen in her mind, Luther the only adult around really paying attention, sitting there on the sidelines like a dirty skeleton but almost handsome, too, in a dark, bloodshot way, like a medicine man, like some yogi. Like he knew things. She saw him give her long sideways glances, she saw that he knew who she really was, she watched him watch her cheat, watched him smile his smile of love. She covered her eyes with one hand until she stopped crying. But she remained on the toilet, small with fear, like a girl of five looking around for her parents, suddenly gone, and then, without actually planning to, she stood up and went to the medicine chest.
There were dozens of bottles of pills, but Rosie stared at a big bottle of aspirin. She saw herself taking them one by one, using the little aqua glass in the toothbrush holder, saw herself crumple to the floor. She closed the door of the medicine chest, studied her ugly, swollen red face, opened the chest again, stared at the aspirin. She couldn’t go back into Charles’s bedroom looking like this, and she couldn’t leave the house on her own. She might as well kill herself. Near the aspirin was a box of Doan’s pills, for backache. There was a girl named Sandy in her homeroom, who already (everyone said) slept with boys, who bragged about getting high on Doan’s pills, Doan’s pills and glue that she’d poured into one of her mother’s boyfriend’s socks and sniffed and sniffed until, she proclaimed, she passed out and woke up a few minutes later, floating and spinning through space, through jewels, through time.
Oh, it sounded like heaven. Heaven.
Rosie found herself wondering where Charles kept the glue. And what kind of glue were you supposed to use, anyway, she wondered. Surely not white glue. Wouldn’t it soak through the sock and drip all over everything? Not Crazy Glue. Maybe rubber cement. There was probably rubber cement in Charles’s great old desk in the study. But what about a sock—how could she sneak one of his socks out of his bedroom without his noticing? She could use her own sock. But she was wearing a Ped, a half-sock that only went to her ankles. Could you use a Ped for a glue-sniffing sock? Fill up the toe area and then clamp the whole thing over your nose, like a gas mask? She closed her eyes and imagined swooning, imagined coming to, swimming through space, through a light show of tropical colors, smiling weakly.
And then there was a voice. “Rosie?” Elizabeth was outside the bathroom. Her mother had finally come.
“What?”
“Are you okay in there?”
“Yes! God!”
She quietly closed the medicine chest, caught a glimpse of her reflection. Her face was still red and blotchy. Then slowly the bathroom door opened, and her mother stepped in, so tall and gentle, smiling sadly.
They sat on the toilet together for twenty minutes, Rosie on Elizabeth’s lap, crying quietly. Elizabeth held her, amazed by her new weight, nuzzled her daughter’s neck with her lips, blowing soft warm air on her skin through her nose, staring off into space.
JAMES had given Elizabeth his spot in the wheelchair and gone off to make them all tea and, Elizabeth surmised, to check his messages. Rosie had gone with him. Charles whispered to Elizabeth that he was distressed to see how unhappy Rosie was to be here, and Elizabeth nodded and tried to explain that of course it was painful for Rosie, and that it was important, and that it was right.
Charles had on his face the look of terrified age, of eyes that will never close. His lips, in the days since Elizabeth had seen him, had fallen into his mouth, and his mouth had all but disappeared into a thin pursed line, choking back expletives and sorrow. His face was exquisitely asymmetrical. Everything on the left side was bigger—the eye, the ear filled with hair—as if when age strikes, everything we’ve hidden with animation gets exposed. It’s all sanpakku, Elizabeth thought; when things were totally screwed up, out of alignment, hopeless, James always said they were sanpakku. And when the whites of your eyes show below the iris, and they hadn’t before, you were definitely all sanpakku—all fucked up.
They held hands and talked of nothing in particular, Elizabeth breathing slowly and calmly, filled with grief, with terror, with a sense of there being no comfort.
“Is someone coming in to touch up your hair these days?” she asked, and he smiled. Then they were silent for a while. There was an extraordinary and chaotic vigor to his eyebrows, but it was clear that he had lost a great deal of ground. You could tell that he had always worn glasses and that now he couldn’t see her very well. James and Rosie were gone a long time. Charles’s stark flat gaze seemed to stare at a wall that was coming at him. Elizabeth felt that his eyes were not looking out at the external world but rather at this wall of his life coming to an end. His thin hair was combed so touchingly, neatly framing his face. But Elizabeth had the sense that his mind had begun to fall to pieces, that his time now was full of trying to remember, that Charles’s amazingly agile mind was now a moth trapped in a jar, and every time it tried something vigorous, more powder fell off.