71

BUT AT HOME THAT EVENING, THE DAY HE’D RUN THE relay, it was more of the same. Rachel was going to be late, and he put together a hotdish from a box and the things Rachel had left in the refrigerator, set it in the oven, and went down the hallway, and there said hello to the nurse Rachel had hired, a silver-haired woman who like to darn, or read Redbook, or Woman’s World, or clip recipes from newspapers on her shift.

“Hello, Doris,” David said.

Doris looked up cheerfully from her magazine. Sometimes her cheerfulness made David want to hit her, he felt so irritated by it, yet today he felt—

He wasn’t sure. Different.

“All right, then,” Doris said, and standing, she passed David, nodding, smelling of the awful ointments they put on Janie, and spearmint gum, which she chewed by the pack, and she got her things in the hallway, and she said she’d be back at the usual time, just as she’d done now for the last two months, and Everything all right? And David answered that it was, and with a curt nod she went out the door, pulling it shut with a click of the lock behind her.

Doris had already fed Janie (it was a job David couldn’t bring himself to help with) and David went into the kitchen and got an orange, and then it struck him what he wanted to do.

He went into his room—he’d been studying in Janie’s, so hard at it he had moved his desk there, after Rachel had taken out the cot and hired Doris—and rummaged through his books, boxes and boxes of books, none of it organized, his room a mess. He hadn’t really seen his room in months, he’d slept here every night, sure, but he hadn’t seen it, and it looked awful, the sheet on the bed thrown back, and the dresser cluttered with letters and brochures from universities, crumpled exams, pens and pencils, a worn three-ring notebook, magazines, a tape player, the last thing he’d thrown there a speeding ticket.

He hadn’t had his license a week when he’d gotten it, and then a second, and then a warning.

The room seemed suddenly suffocating, the clutter, and the mess of it, and he saw it now as if he were someone else.

And seeing it, he felt a kind of temporary panic, digging through the books, now in the closet, then under the bed—dust bunnies galore, and a sock, suspiciously dirty, which embarrassed him somehow—and he stood, setting his hands on either side of his head, surprised at how angry he felt, so angry he couldn’t think.

Where was it? What Janie had loved him to read to her, and what he’d hidden, at least put out of sight, because it had hurt him to remember anything. Before. Because he’d come to think he had died out there, and thought of the date, even, as that, his death, and the resurrection he’d been waiting for—to come out of this void he was in, so far inside himself he was surprised his very thoughts didn’t echo—hadn’t come, but he felt something of it in him now, and he had to act on it.

Not later. Today. Now.

He began to dig through things, a box of old Heathkit radios, a shortwave kit, car models, a box of Junior Great Books, and he began to throw things from a box, the contents strewn across the floor, as if there lay his very childhood, model airplanes, and grotesque creatures he recalled as having been named Weirdos, and he tossed out the contents of one box after another, until there were no more boxes.

He thought of Janie then, in the room across the hallway, and he straddled the mess, digging again, now in his dresser drawers, under the bed again, in his book cabinet, ripping a page from Green Eggs and Ham, and balling it in his fist, and punching a hole in the cabinet’s glass doors, cutting his knuckles, but still he continued to dig, this strange whimper in him, this panic, it’s not here, it’s not here, so where is it? he thought, but still tore lids from boxes, overturned them on the floor, kicking through the junk, until he’d nearly overturned the whole room, and then remembered, and was—

almost—elated.

(He wouldn’t have said it, didn’t think it, but in his mind was magic, was incantation, was elixir, was potion, was magic word, was—because the neurologist had said nothing was wrong with her, with Janie, not really, that she could, just any time, pop out of it, and he warned them that when she did, she might be screaming, right in it, there was no saying with cases like this, with—but he didn’t say it—catatonics.)

David left his room and went into Janie’s, and at his desk yanked out the bottom right drawer, packed with junk, Estes rocket parts, discarded pens and pencils, fishing lures in crumpled packets, baseball cards, and he lifted all of it out until he had what he was looking for, the book Janie had loved, this once seeming saccharine book, but which he now saw might be some flip side of the coin they’d tossed, he and Janie, heads down.

He felt, holding the book across from Janie, both something awful—because somewhere, sometime after what had happened, he’d thought to do it, but hadn’t been able to, he’d been too afraid, not for Janie but for himself—but now, just today, after running again, for the first time he also felt . . . hopeful.

He would try this.

And he sat by the bed, Janie turned to the wall, and he opened the book, and when his throat swelled up, he imagined himself with the tumpline around his head, and the pack on his back with Janie in it, told himself this was nothing sitting here, lied to himself, but falling inside himself again, frightened for himself at it, he turned back the pages anyway, and quietly began.

“‘The mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.’ ”

He had to stop at that, his throat had swollen so badly at it, and he looked at Janie, wishing for some change, this miracle, but she didn’t move. He couldn’t even tell if she was awake.

“‘First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his fur...’”

He read to her until he smelled the hotdish burning, then went into the kitchen and scavenged what had not burned for himself, leaving a large portion for Rachel, who was out late tonight.

David knew it might be Jarvis, he’d called and asked about her, and David had hung up on him. He’d called a few times since all of it had come out in the papers, what had happened, and how the district judge had dismissed the lawsuits that had been filed against them as insubstantial, of no merit.

So deep had they been in reclaiming their lives that the judge’s decision had caused not much more than a ripple in their day. A sigh of relief, soon glossed over by their concern for Janie.

David took his bowl and went back into the bedroom, where the book had fallen onto the floor. He picked up the book, trying to find the right page, the hotdish perched on his lap.

He opened the book to the first page again, and he began to read, his voice taking on the tone of a hymn, or of a cantor, or of benediction, and he knew to fill the room with that voice, and he read.

He read the book all that week, and part of the next. And he ran. He ran over at the university, and there was some flap about his eligibility if he did run, and David paid it little attention, because cross-country would start soon, and he would have months before fall and the football team coming out, and Buddy out with them, but Buddy was never far off in his thoughts.

Just his name, some dark premonition. Buddy.

And he ran. He ran into the bubble, and he was out again, himself, running, if just for those moments, and he began to think he really would leave early, leave Morningside, there was nothing in it for him, it was long over, he’d toss it as he had everything in his room—he’d taken his models, and radios, and junk out in bags, knowing, maybe, someday, when he was not so hard on himself, he would regret this, but he did it anyway, threw away his childhood, threw away everything, but for a baseball Max had given him, autographed by Harmon Killebrew, and in this destruction was a dark joy.

But his greatest joy was Janie.

Now when he read, if he stopped, she would shift in the bed. Now when he paused, she stiffened, waiting. And it was this he was doing, testing her.

He said nothing about it to Rachel, who sat, evenings, in her grief, so silent he wanted to tell her if anything she was hurting Janie, just hovering there, and all this dread and loss in her quiet.

All these months.

And David said nothing, because he hoped—a kind of hope against hope—that what he saw was real, the twitch of Janie’s fingers, how her legs stiffened, how she tilted her head to better hear.

And he hoped she could feel what he brought into the room, almost as if he cupped this light in his hands, carried it from his heart, and set it there, for her, in his voice, in his footsteps. In his setting his hand on her shoulder while he read, turning the pages with his thumb, sometimes hating her for her messing herself, and the rubber sheets under the linen, and the horror of feeding her, which he couldn’t bear, but did anyway now, and feeling weak and terrible for not being able to do it more often, and so he all the more brought this calm to her in reading, and he was true to his promise, though today had been an awful day, Buddy showing up at the field house, a soon-to-be redshirt for the university football team it turned out, lifting weights on the far end of the field-house, and Buddy eyeing him, and there in David this terrible sinking feeling, and he was feeling it so powerfully, he almost turned from Janie’s room, but decided to go in, anyway.

Read to her.

She’d saved his life, earlier, in that bad time. How could he not?

“Okay, Sport,” he said.

He hadn’t used her nickname since . . . back then. And it surprised him that it just came out.

He balanced his hotdish on his lap; he could never get himself to use a TV tray, because that would be too permanent, and the book fell, and he picked it up, and suddenly he could barely breathe, for the pain he felt, but he opened the book—he’d been in the middle somewhere—at the first page, and began again, and Janie said, “You were at that part where it goes, ‘The mole subsided forlornly on a tree-stump and tried to control himself, for he felt it surely coming.’ That’s where you stopped,” she said.

David sat in his chair, stunned.

Janie turned slowly to look at him, her eyes still gray-rimmed, and sunken in, and he couldn’t control himself; he bent around her, and gathering her up in his arms, wept.

After a time, she said, “Put me on the throne, I need to go.”

“Okay, Sport,” he said.

And he did that.