Seventeen
GRACE WALKED OUT OF the hospital, and crossed to Beacon Hill.
As she got to the other side of Grove, she looked back, once, at the curved white frontage of the hospital tower, standing out against the darkening night sky. Then, she walked on up the slope, staring down at the cobbled road and pavement. At the corner, she stopped again, breathing heavily.
It was still warm. Hot, even. She waited for the dizziness and the stitch in her shoulder to subside. Over the other side of the hill, she could hear the ever-present rumble of traffic. But here it was quiet, thank God. Only the wheezing drone of air conditioners, and, from somewhere above her, music. She leaned on the wall of the corner house, and looked up Revere Street.
David had insisted upon seeing the neurosurgeon. She had been surprised at David’s immovability: literal immovability. He had stood by the nurses’ station and waited, his hands in his pockets and his face blank.
“He’ll find us,” Grace had urged him. “Come and stand near Anna. You can see her. They’ll let us get closer to her in a minute.”
“I hate the noise in there,” he’d muttered.
“What noise?” she’d asked. She had long since ceased to hear the ICU.
Even when Dr. Coram came, David would not sit down.
“What’s happening?” he asked, without any preamble.
“There’s a secondary bleed,” the surgeon said. “And a parenchymal injury.”
“A what?” Grace said.
“A contusion in the brain itself.”
“How bad?” David said.
Dr. Coram looked at him, and at the rigid, unmoving way that he was standing. “It’s early days.”
“It’s been fifty-two hours,” Grace said. “She hasn’t opened her eyes. She hasn’t moved since the ventilator.”
“We have a CT scan,” the surgeon replied.
“And?” David demanded. “What else?”
“They do tests all the time,” Grace murmured to him. She was holding his arm. It felt like stone.
“The GCS shows us the level of consciousness and the degree of dysfunction,” Dr. Coram explained. “It’s a test for coma. A high score would be fifteen—that would be a relatively mild injury…”
“What is Anna’s score?” David asked.
The surgeon looked first at Grace, and then at David. “These are early tests,” he repeated. “Only one of those at our disposal. They test verbal responses, motor responses…”
“What is Anna’s score?” David insisted.
“Nine.”
Grace took a huge intake of breath.
“Nine,” David repeated. “That’s…that’s nothing. No response.”
“Brain injury changes almost from minute to minute,” Dr. Coram told him. “Hour to hour.”
“But to take her in for a second operation,” David said. “That’s not so good. That’s an emergency.”
“Everything we do here just now is urgent.”
“A second bleed into a bruised brain,” David murmured. He seemed to be thinking out loud, his eyes fixed on the physician.
“It’s a blunt head trauma,” the man told them. “She hit the wheel, the dashboard.”
“What are the chances?” David asked.
Grace gripped him harder. This was a question she didn’t want answered. She didn’t want to hear. “We’ll go sit with her,” she urged.
The surgeon put his hand on David’s shoulder. “We’ll see how she gets through the next couple of days.”
“The chances,” David repeated. “Please.”
Dr. Coram’s hand dropped. “I’m not a gambling man,” he said. “I don’t give odds, Mr. Mortimer.”
When Grace got to Garrett’s door, it opened before she had a chance to ring. She saw at once that Garrett was standing in the hallway, and Rachel was on the stairs, taking two steps up and two down again. When she saw her grandmother, she stepped up to the door, and then back to the stairs.
“You’re late,” Garrett said. “She’s been anxious.”
“OK,” Grace said. She held out her hand. “Come on then, honey.”
“It’s time,” Rachel said. “It’s nine-sixteen.”
“I know that,” Grace admitted. “Let’s go.” The child’s hand in hers was loose, the fingers uncurled. “You’ve got everything?”
“Where is David?” Garrett asked.
“He’s with Anna.”
“She’s back from surgery?”
“Yes,” Grace said.
“What did the doctor say?”
Rachel was repeating her two-step on the pavement, up and down the curb. Distracted, Grace glanced up at the man in the doorway. “I gave David my phone,” she said. “Call him. Or go down.”
“I can’t do that,” Garrett said. “The reception is tonight. I’m late already by an hour.”
She stared at him. It was a second or two before she found she could speak. “You mean to say it’s going ahead?” she asked.
“Of course it is,” he told her.
“Tonight?”
“Anna has worked for this all year.”
“You couldn’t make it another day?”
“The invitations were all sent out.”
“Oh, right,” she said. She started to laugh, mirthlessly but steadily. The absurdity of it overtook the exasperation.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Go down there and bolt the doors, and turn everyone away? There are two hundred people coming.”
“Yes,” she said. “Turn them away. Let’s see, what could you say? ‘The artist is indisposed.’ Try that.”
“Anna set this date,” he said. “It’s what she wanted.”
Grace looked at him in astonishment for a few seconds longer. “I’ve got to go,” she said at last.
“It’s what she wanted,” he repeated.
“Have a wonderful night,” she said.
They started down the street.
All the way to Downtown Crossing, Grace’s heart kept up the almost visible patter in her chest. She put her hand to her skin once or twice, pressing her fingertips to the depressions between her ribs just under the clavicle, and she kept it there as they stepped down to the T platform, and waited for the train.
When it came, it was, miraculously, half-empty. She subsided gratefully into a seat, with Rachel beside her. After a while, as the T accelerated, she glanced at her granddaughter’s face, and saw her watching the wires, walls, and road signs beyond the window, head tipped very slightly to one side. Rachel would blink as walls ended and began again, and as streetlights flashed for a second and were gone. She took no notice at all of the man opposite them, who had fallen asleep with a newspaper in his hand, whose pages were ticking back and forth with the motion of the rail.
They got off at Forest Hills and walked along the street that was separated from the Arborway by a steel fence. Anna’s house stood on Devonshire, facing the traffic across a phalanx of lime trees: gray-painted board with tall, dusty windows. A few kids played in the street, or slumped on the porches. Through open windows came the blue glare of TV’s.
As Grace walked up Anna’s porch steps, her neighbor came out, a plastic bag of rubbish in one hand. The woman stopped as she saw the two of them on the step.
“Grace,” she called. “Is it true?”
Grace looked across at her. Anna’s neighbor, Jen, was young. She had two children, and a husband who worked abroad. They had talked many times on nights like these, watching the bikes in the road, the trees gently moving, the continual drone of cars beyond.
Jen leaned now on her rail, holding out her hand. “Grace…”
“Inside,” Rachel said. She was tapping the lock with her fingers. Rhythm. Traffic, doorstep, rattle of the key in Grace’s hand. Step, rattle, tap.
Grace put the key in the lock, but couldn’t make it turn. All the while Rachel kept up the rhythm. She shuffled from side to side, concentrating on the door, fingers tapping.
Before Grace knew it, Jen’s hand was on her shoulder.
“I can’t work the damn key here,” Grace said.
“Give it to me,” Jen told her. She opened the door, let Rachel go ahead, and put her arm around Grace’s waist. In the darkness of the doorway, Grace leaned on her, and wept hard: a twisting, deep, physical exertion.
“I’ve been waiting all day,” Jen said. “Someone in the store said they were in an accident.”
Grace leaned against the hallway wall.
Rachel was at the foot of the stairs, waiting.
“Honey,” Grace said to her granddaughter, “tonight, I have to help you wash.”
“My shower,” Rachel said.
“Not tonight,” Grace told her. “Because of your arm.” She felt for the light, but missed the switch. It didn’t seem to matter. She stood with one foot across the doorway, one foot in the hall, breathing slowly, as if through some sort of mask, such was the effort.
“What happened?” Jen whispered.
“They were on ninety-three. A truck came into them from the back.”
“And Anna…?”
“She’s still unconscious. She’s got a head injury.”
“My God,” Jen breathed. “Oh, Lord.”
“Grandma,” Rachel said. “My shower.”
“You can’t put your arm in the shower,” Grace repeated quietly. “We have to work something out, OK? For your cast. Let me think a minute.”
“We can take it off.”
“You can’t take a cast off,” Grace said. “There’s a break in your arm. It has to heal, OK? Remember? We looked at the pictures.”
It seemed weeks ago that they had stood together and gazed at the fracture showing on the X ray. Weeks, months. Another life. It had only been this morning.
“I’m going to come and help you,” Grace said. She tried to work it out. “OK, let’s see, you could stand in the shower and wash, but not let water get to the cast,” she explained. “And you have to take your soap in one hand, Rachel. One hand, all right? I’ll come and help you.”
“No,” Rachel said. She was halfway up the stairs, running full tilt.
Slowly, Grace went through to the kitchen. The whiteness of chairs and the table, luminous like ghosts. A jar in the center of the scrubbed oak tabletop. In the confined space, the cut climbing roses imprinted their scent on the room, soaking the shadows.
“I’ll check on her,” Jen murmured. “Sit down. I’ll put on the light and make you some tea.”
“No,” Grace told her. “Leave the light, dear. I’ve been seeing white light in that hospital for so long. The dark is nice.”
They stood for a second, listening to Rachel’s footsteps above.
Grace knew what her granddaughter was doing. Rachel was figuring spaces. It happened every time something new came into the house. She would measure the room in steps, almost as if she were checking how much space were left. She would do it tonight, because of the cast, and the way it threw her, and disturbed her pattern. To watch her engaged in the silent measuring would be to witness a private, meticulous dance.
“What can I do?” Jen asked.
Grace took out a tissue, and blew her nose. “Oh, Jen. I just need to sleep. That’s all.”
“You want me to take care of Rachel?”
The shadows were intimate: a meeting of faces and hands. The younger woman’s warmth, the smell of other children. “We’ll be fine,” Grace said. “Really.”
“You’ll call over, phone me,” Jen said. “If there’s anything tonight…”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get some groceries for you tomorrow?”
“Thank you.”
Just one hand left, pressing hers now in the silence.
“Go on,” Grace urged.
“I’ll come by in the morning…”
“OK,” Grace said. “OK.”
The house smelled stuffy, overcooked. Grace listened to the sound of Jen opening her own front door, and the slam of the screen. Then, she pushed open the windows, looked at the square of grass in the backyard, the red swing, and the jungle gym, their colors just glimmers in the half-light. She turned back and went through the ground floor of the house, opening each window, letting in the drizzle of night air and the smell of the street. In the long room at the back, she switched on the lamp and sank down to the blissful respite of the couch.
On the opposite wall was a painting that Anna had done when she first came to Boston. When her colors were still blazing. It was a painting of the famous red corrugated iron wall by the dock at Rockport, with dozens of fishing floats: blue and white, red, green, terra-cotta, yellow, set against the red, with a mid-blue sky hanging over the tile roof above. Grace looked at it hard. She reached into her bag and found the cigarettes, and lit one, and her heart sank back again to a sluggish murmur. She closed her eyes.
Her parents had first brought her to Rockport. They would come down in the fall, when the worst of the crowds were gone. It was where her father had been brought up as a boy, and they rented a cottage every year, right up until the fogs rolled in off the Atlantic. He liked those long gray twilights of the year; evenings on the beach watching the indigo color in the sea. It was here that she herself had begun to draw: cartoon men in cartoon boats; the faces in the stores; white spits of sand, and brown-laced rock; and her father’s hands and face—his fist around a cup of coffee; the set of his mouth while he concentrated. And the lobsters at Pete’s Café. Looking into the murky holding tank, watching the claws scuttling on the glass. She used to draw them, fascinated by their elongation, their primeval shape and Day-Glo bodies when they were served up on the plates.
When she herself had grown up, she had come to Boston to work, on no more than a whim. It was only to be a summer. A fall. A winter. Perhaps a spring. No more than a year. She had felt claustrophobic in her hometown, with its single store and filling station, the two hand pumps on the single street, the Baptist church, the long ride up to Springfield past flat hilltop fields, green square and gold square, green square and gold square, in drowsy repetition; tired even of the blood-chill threat of bears on the slopes below, in the unmanaged tiers of Appalachian trees, and of the curiously still meadow at night above the house. Tired perhaps of the summer trek to the coast. She had wanted to be in the city through four seasons; that was the single scope of her ambition. She had never counted on meeting a married man when she was eighteen. Or falling deeply in love with him, a love that was unreturned for more than ten years. Last of all, she had not foreseen—the reckless stupidity of passion—getting pregnant by him. Or losing her child’s father back to his wife.
She had sold the Deerfield house when her parents died. It was, above everything else, the thing that she regretted. More so even than Anna’s father’s absence, or her own naïveté, or at being the recipient of the coldly charitable check through the door every month. She had missed that old house like hell. Its icy washroom with a tin jug and bowl and a wickerwork table that never stood straight, and the blue rug on the floor as you came in the door, that particular blue, a shade of blue almost gray. Her father had died when Anna was six, never having brought himself to terms with Grace’s unmarried life, or the fact that she lived in the Ogunquit house, neither mistress nor wife, but something else. Driftwood, maybe. Cleanly polished and put on a mantel to look at. Not truly belonging there, or anywhere.
She told herself that she was too independent to go back home, and bear the sidelong looks. Sometimes, to herself, deep in the night when she gazed into darkness, her conscience would whisper to her that perhaps she was ashamed. But, in truth, it was neither independence nor shame. It was her father’s sadness for her that she couldn’t bear.
He was eighty-two when he died. After falling down in the meadow one late September afternoon, trying to cut a sapling by hand, he had complained of the pain in his back. He wrote her that it irritated him not to be able to get on the truck and haul out the stumps; that one of the youngsters from the village had had to come up and that he had been forced to watch him do his work. Six weeks later, he died in the county hospital of a cancer in the spine. She went to the house and took away the rug, and the tin jug and bowl, and some of his pictures and photos, and she had stood looking at the old school drawings in the outhouse, the giraffe and cow and drop-eared dog, and at his immovable white 1938 convertible with the torn black cloth roof.
She dreamed sometimes of the house now. She would be young—curiously young when her father was young. Like brother and sister, they would stand on the outhouse step next to the convertible. Sometimes it would be summer. Sometimes the snow would be falling, and Anna running through it, arms outstretched.
She and Anna had walked down to the Ogunquit beach a week after Anna came back from England.
It was early in the morning; too early for the crowds. They sat on the jetty and looked at the sea. Nothing had been said until that moment, and there was suddenly no introduction, no small talk. The question flew into Grace’s head, and straight out of her mouth.
“How many weeks?” Grace had asked.
Anna was taking little stones from the wood platform, little pieces of grit and gravel, and throwing them into the sea. She had a palmful of them. She showed no reaction: no surprise, no denial.
“Sixteen,” she said. The stones made lazy circles where they had fallen, and the circles, equally lazily, were pulled out of shape by the tide. Waves washed the jetty, little waves making a hushing sound.
“What is it that you want to do?” Grace asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you make a decision?”
“No.”
They watched the first tourist boat of the day go out just beyond the shore, tacking up and down parallel to the beach.
“I wanted to be home more than anything else,” Anna told her.
Grace was having trouble. She had fisted her free hand and tucked it under her leg, so that the knuckles actually hurt against the wood, just to stop her saying something she might regret. But it came out anyway.
“Of all the things I didn’t want for you,” she said, “it was to be like me.”
Anna shifted away from her, slightly raising her head.
“What did David say?”
“I didn’t tell him,” Anna murmured.
“You…?” Grace raised her eyes to heaven. “Oh, Lord God almighty. You came all this way, and you never told him? You ran out on him? Are you crazy?”
The two women had stared at each other.
“Do you know what?” Anna had demanded. “Look at this family.”
“What family? Ours?”
“Yes.”
“But, Anna,” she said, “who are you talking about? Your grandparents?”
Anna had pouted like a child, and looked away.
“There couldn’t be a more ordinary couple…”
“I don’t mean them.”
“Who, then?”
Anna shook her head.
“Is it David?”
“No.”
“Something about his family?” Grace asked. “What did they say to you?”
A long, breathy hiss escaped Anna; a kind of laugh.
“What did they say?” Grace insisted.
“Nothing,” Anna replied.
“I thought you liked his sister.”
“I do.”
“Well, who?”
“Forget it,” Anna had said.
Grace looked at her. “Something in David’s family drove you away,” she said.
“No,” Anna told her. “Not exactly,” she murmured.
“Something you saw in David?”
Silence. Grace took Anna’s hand and stroked it. “Remoteness,” Anna murmured. “I’m afraid he’ll…draw back. Disappear.”
“So you did it first?” Grace said. She shook her head. “Sure, that makes a whole lot of sense.”
“I don’t know,” Anna told her, “I can’t think.”
“Well, you can’t go on not thinking.”
Anna’s mouth wavered. Rachel had just the same expression now, when frustrated or exasperated.
“You gave up your studies,” Grace said. “We have to find a way around that. Your father wanted an education for you.”
“What did he care?” Anna said.
Grace had to take a deep, deep breath. “He left you well provided for,” she said. “He was proud of you.”
“Yeah, right,” Anna murmured. “So he told me on Christmas cards.”
Grace had tried. She had tried so hard. When first pregnant, she had visited him in the offices where he worked. It was a bank. He was director of something. She saw the brass sign on his door in her mind’s eye. He had been appalled at the news. In that first minute, she had lost the sweet-natured man who had shared her bed for months, and found him replaced by a cold-faced and dutiful stranger, who respected her decision to keep her child, but told her emphatically that he would never see his offspring. He had a reputation to keep up. He had a large family to maintain. A house in the Hamptons. A condominium in Florida. A house in Grenada. He had listed them for her, all these things he could lose, while she listened in dazed horror. He had promised her money for secrecy.
What do you do, faced with this?
Go back out into the street and walk right down to the church underneath the Hancock Tower, and stare at the crucifix outside the door. The church where he devoutly worshiped every day. Turn away, with the taste of dust in your throat, and a fierce pain burning.
She sighed to herself as she looked at Anna. The sun was getting higher. The first families were coming onto the beach below them.
“Anna,” Grace said, at last. “You have to tell David about this. That’s the first thing you have to do.”
“Why?” Anna said. “So he can run a mile? So I take him to court for child support?”
Grace paused only a second. “Is he going to run a mile?”
“Maybe.”
“He’d really do that? He’d really run a mile?”
Anna threw down the gravel, and wiped her hands on her dress. “I don’t know.”
“My God!” Grace had exclaimed. “How much longer are you going to stick your head in the sand? What’s the matter with you?”
Anna had stood up. “I’m pregnant!” she’d cried. “And I don’t know what to do!”
Still sitting, Grace had gazed up at her. Then, she scrambled to her feet. Anna had begun walking back; Grace ran after her, and grabbed her by the arm, and turned Anna around to face her.
“Why did you come home?” she asked.
Anna didn’t reply.
“Did you come to hear me tell you it’s OK?” Grace demanded. “Because I’m not going to tell you that. Do you understand? It’s not OK.”
“Fine,” Anna said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t give me all that shit,” Grace exclaimed.
“I’ll go somewhere,” Anna said. “Then you won’t have to watch me. And I won’t have to listen to you, either.”
“Anna, Anna, please…”
“I’ll just go somewhere…”
“Stop it,” Grace warned. “Anna! This isn’t a game.”
“Oh, I know that,” Anna retorted. “I’m not like you, and this isn’t a duplicate of your life. Because I’m not doing what you did. I’m not going to be abandoned. To see his face when I tell him. To see him slowly vanish from me.” She almost spat the last sentence out.
Grace looked at her aghast.
Anna walked quickly away. Grace watched her, the set of her shoulders, the thin body in the blue dress.
She started to run. After a few moments, she caught up with Anna. She looked into her daughter’s face—this beautiful, clever daughter she had raised—and saw the utter confusion there. “Don’t be alone,” she said. “I love you so.”
Anna’s face crumpled. Grace took out a tissue, and wiped Anna’s face. Just like she used to do when she was a toddler. And Anna meekly allowed it, tears pouring down, hands hanging by her sides.
Upstairs, now, Grace heard the water running.
She could hear Rachel’s voice. Whether it was a song, or whether her granddaughter was calling her, she couldn’t tell. For a moment, the nineteen-year-old Anna, so thin in the blue dress, swept back into the room and into her embrace, her head on her mother’s shoulder. She could still feel Anna’s hand in hers, and she saw the bitten quick of the fingers.
She had held that hand today, and yesterday.
She smoothed her fingers over her own face now, drawing the skin tight over her cheekbones. Then, she got up from the couch.
“Rachel?” she called. “Rachel…?”
She took one more long look at the exuberant painting on the wall in front of her; then, she walked out into the hall, and started, slowly, up the stairs.