She used arnica and bromelain to minimize the swelling. Vitamin K and quercetin and silicone dressings. As soon as she’d healed from one procedure she went back for another. The doctors tightened up her neck by cutting downward through her chin. They cut her eyelids, too, and they used thread to lift the muscles in her cheeks. It was strong as fishing line, and sometimes she felt it above her jaw. This tiny filament that kept her face from falling. Every month there were advances. Lasers to burn away spider veins and brown spots and injectable filler. She wanted all these things. She lurked on message boards, and the women there talked like lovers about their surgeons. She wrote down all the names.
Her mother said she was starting to look a little Slavic. She stood at the stove with a wooden spoon. “It’s not natural what you’re doing,” she said. “Just look how your eyes are slanting.” Her mother’s face was spotted from all those years in the garden. She hadn’t worn a sunhat back then because nobody did, and she didn’t wear one now because what did it matter. She was almost eighty, and her hair was white around her face and soft as cotton balls. You were a good girl growing up, Carol. That’s what she always said. Don’t make me worry now.
They sat together when the eggs were ready. Carol went to visit every Sunday. She wore sunglasses because her eyes were still sore from the needle. The doctor had massaged the droplets once they were inside. He kneaded her skin like dough. She told her mother about the new doctors up in Denver. They had offices in Aspen and California, too. They were always taking planes. “They’re the best in the country,” she said. The light was starting to come through the café curtains, and they were the same ones from when Carol was in college more than thirty years before. The sun had bleached them a paler yellow. The Little Red Riding Hood cookie jar was the same, too, and the refrigerator magnets with faded columbines. A picture of Jenny from the second grade. Her hair was tied up in ribbons. She looked just like Carol had when Carol was a girl. “They specialize in veins.”
“You could see the pyramids if you wanted or those volcanoes in Hawaii.” Her mother stirred Splenda into her coffee. Her hands were spotted just like her cheeks. They were speckled as robin eggs.
“They worked on Sharon Stone.”
“Can’t you take your glasses off? I can hardly see your face.”
Carol shook her head. The sun was really shining now. Another windy December day, and she didn’t want to squint. The room smelled of coffee and eggs overcooked in butter. Her mother always overheated the frying pan because eggs carry diseases. Five hundred people a year died from salmonella, and probably more the news won’t tell us. Her mother knew the numbers. She spent hours on WebMD.
“Someday they won’t need scalpels. They’ll go straight to the genes.”
“God help us then,” her mother said, and she took the remote from the table. It was almost nine o’clock, and she never missed Dr. Dyer. He talked about how the spirit is all around us, how it fills us from inside and we can find it if we look.
Carol pushed her plate away before it was empty. Aging was a disease, and they were working on a cure. There were entire villages in Japan where people lived to a hundred and twenty. All they ate was fish. “Those scientists at Berkeley were just on TV again. If we starve ourselves we can live forever. That’s what they were saying.”
“None of it will bring them back.” Her mother shifted in her chair. She winced a little because her right hip was bad. The socket was starting to fail. “Be grateful for what you have.” She raised the remote like a wand and aimed it over Carol’s shoulder.
Stop the clocks and turn them back. Stop the changing of the seasons. Another gray winter and her girl was gone. Another muddy spring. Change the bulbs from white to pink. Use dark shades to diffuse the light. She learned about lighting from the boards and her rejuvenation magazines. Candlelight was gentlest of all, and she had scented pillars on all her tables. The apartment was hushed as a church when she lit them at night. It was sweet with the smell of roses.
The specialist in Denver looked at her hands. He held them in his and raised them up to the light. The veins looked so blue, and Carol felt ashamed. They rose like rivers beneath her skin. There were ads on the walls for eyelash conditioners and Juvéderm, and the women in the posters were perfect. They were brown and ivory and gold, and they looked past the camera when they smiled. They had no pores and no wrinkles, no dark spots from the sun. Their whole lives they’d never know the touch of unkind hands.
The doctors were using Radiesse at the clinic. Just a few injections along the bones where the skin had gotten thin. The veins were trickier, but endoscopic lasers helped. They used a wire thin as any filament and it burns them from inside. She knew these things. She had her list of questions ready.
The doctor in charge was named Mittelman. He was probably fifty, but his hair was still dark. He looked like a character from Days of Our Lives. “It’s hereditary,” he said. “Some people just have thin skin.” He pressed his fingers against her veins, and the residents leaned in to see. They were so serious with their clipboards, and one of them was a girl in high-top tennis shoes. A medical student who wasn’t older than twenty-six. They might have been classmates once, Jenny and this girl. They might have known each other as children.
Mittelman looked right at Carol when he talked. His eyes were pale in the light from the window, and she wondered what he saw. The surgeries she’d had, the lasers and the doctors with their needles. Surgeons were like artists and like painters. They knew each other’s work.
“Come closer,” he said, and he motioned toward the residents. They gathered around, those young heads, and Carol felt a tightness in her chest. Her eyes began to brim. Who could say why the tears came. There wasn’t any logical reason. She thought of Jenny and her gray eyes. Pale as sea glass and fringed with those dark lashes. There was a terrible silence in the room. The doctor stepped back and the residents looked down at their notebooks, and Jenny was alive in another place. Maybe she lived in Boulder. That’s where the young people went. There were coffeehouses on every corner.
“I’m doing this for myself,” Carol said. She wiped her wet cheeks with her palms. She knew the things she had to say. The surgery wouldn’t change her life. She had realistic expectations. “It’s for my birthday. It’s a gift I’m getting for myself.” She said these things, and the doctor saw right through them.
She’d let go of her baby’s hand. It was only for a minute. Four days until Christmas. The mall was crowded with crying babies and mothers pushing strollers. People didn’t apologize if they hit you with their bags. She let go of her baby’s hand and looked for her car keys. She reached inside her purse, and her Bic pen had broken and the ink was puddled at the bottom. It was leaking through the leather. She knew the moments now. She knew them all as if they were showing on some white screen, and she watched them as they happened. She looked over her shoulder and a little boy was screaming in the aisle. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he clenched his fists like somebody having a seizure. He’d be twenty-two now, maybe twenty-three. He’d be graduating from college. His mother was on her knees trying to calm him down. People fussed with their bags and their winter coats, and her baby wasn’t there. “Jenny,” she said, and her voice was shrill. “Jenny, come here.” She turned in circles, and she saw a half dozen little girls, but none of them wore a red jumper. They didn’t have ribbons in their hair.
The security guards came first and then four policemen who’d been eating at Wendy’s. They smelled like onions from their burgers. The policemen and the fire truck and her husband who drove straight from his office at the Schlage Lock company. They walked through the mall, endless loops around the food court, and Santa was there with all the little kids waiting in line. Around the parking lot and up Chelton where the snow was melting beside the curbs. Up and down the streets and back to the mall where the stores were closing for the evening and all the stars came out and they didn’t sleep that night or the next. The hours stretched and contracted and time stopped without her baby. The sun didn’t rise or set.
Three days later or maybe it was a week, and her fingers were black from the ink. She scrubbed until her skin was raw. Until Rick took away the scouring pads. “What are you doing,” he said. “You’re bleeding on the rug.” She kept washing because her hands were never clean. Lava Soap and Comet couldn’t take away the stain.
The bosses were in a meeting. She made sure they had their coffee and their French crullers. Mr. Fitz the owner was picky about his donuts. What would we do without you, he told her more than once. You keep this office running. She was a bookkeeper and not a secretary, but she didn’t mind the work. Marnelle the secretary was out on maternity leave. Last month she had twin baby girls, and Carol had the place to herself. She watered the ferns and cleaned the betta fish bowl because the water always got cloudy.
Fitz looked contented when he came out of the conference room. His shirt strained around his belly. “By God you’re a hard worker,” he said. “That look of concentration.” He stopped in front of Carol’s bay and rapped his knuckles on the counter. He was losing all his hair. He was the grandson of the original owners. It was Fitzes all the way up the company tree. Concrete runs in our veins, he’d say. That’s why we’re all so heavy. He laughed each time he said it, as if the joke were new.
She waited until he was inside his office. He had golf balls in plexiglass domes from every course he’d ever played and pictures of his chubby daughters. Mahogany furniture and green felt coasters and a miniature Mount Rushmore cast in cement. The door closed and his chair creaked when he sat down, and that’s when she turned to the accounts.
She took only what she needed. Almost every month she wrote a few checks to herself. It wasn’t hard because she knew the requirements for setting up small businesses. She named them JB Holdings and JB Services and JLB Supplies, and she set up accounts at the Exchange National Bank and the Ent Credit Union on Wahsatch. She had so many accounts and so many names, and she tracked them all on spreadsheets. She paid her taxes, too, because that’s how they got Capone. He shot people with his Tommy gun, but they nailed him on his returns. She set up those accounts and made out the checks, and she should have felt bad when Mr. Fitz worked so hard to keep the family business going. He didn’t complain when she took vacation time or left early for her appointments. She was a thief, and she should have been ashamed.
Mr. Fitz was getting angry behind his door. His voice always changed when he called the guys at the plant. The kiln was down again, and it would be another week before they got the coils. “Sweet Jesus,” he said. “Can’t you do it right for once? Can’t you take care of a single goddamn thing?” His chair rolled across the plastic mat that protected his green carpet. She could hear the wheels going back and forth, and his face was probably pink by now. He’d be in there for hours.
Carol finished all the checks before he was done with the call. He was really yelling now. Someday he’d have a seizure if he wasn’t careful. Someday his heart would stop. She signed the checks and set them in envelopes. She took the real ones to the mailbox, and then she went back to the message boards and looked for some new names.
Dr. Ashrawi mapped all the places for the needles. His eyes were the color of walnuts, and they looked serious even when he smiled. He had done his training in Beirut. Women came to see him from Cairo and the Gulf, and he was only in Denver for the winter. He was teaching at the DU Medical School. He catered to the ladies in Cherry Creek who were tired of their hands. Whose skin was dried as jerky from all their tennis games.
“Relax, Ms. Bishop,” he said. “Listen to the music.” This was the moment. It was always the moment when the world narrowed to a point. She knew the sting when it came. She knew the needle and the burning. This is what it feels like when there’s a fire in your veins. The walls were gray like her baby’s eyes. There were lilies on the counter. She could smell them from her chair. That sweet smell and the cleaners, too, and gentle music through the speakers. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” “Light My Fire.” Just the melody and no words. Rick had loved the Doors. He’d danced to them when they first bought the house. There was no furniture in the living room, not even a pillow or a rug, only the Sansui quadraphonic system in the middle of the room. He turned the volume on high because that’s what people did when they had no neighbors through the walls. He slid along the floor in his wool camping socks. We’re home, he said. Every brick belongs to us. He swung his arms around, and there was nothing graceful in how he moved and that was why she loved him.
The Nagys came and the Biedelmanns and all the neighbor boys. They made a fan and walked the fields behind the Emerson Middle School. Rick led them like a captain, Rick who had two teenagers now and lived up in Fort Collins. He drew circles on the map, and the circles kept getting wider. The police came with their dogs and volunteers on horses, and nobody found a trace. The Christmas trees came down and her baby was gone. In April the tulips broke through. She kept the hairs from Jenny’s bristle brush. She kept the dirty laundry and the bed just as it was. She’d pestered Jenny to make her own bed. You’re almost seven, she’d said. You need to learn to clean your room, and now she left it messy. She was grateful for the clutter and the marker scribbles on the wall. Grateful for the chipped baseboards because these were the things her girl had touched.
The dishes stayed in the washer for weeks. It was hard to turn the dial to make it run. The leaves weren’t raked and the bills went unpaid and it was hard to remember what day it was or why they were together. She saw Jenny everywhere she looked. She’d tell Rick to stop the car, to turn, to look where she was pointing. A girl walking in the mall who tilts her head the way she used to. A mother pushing a stroller. She looked for Jenny in every mother’s face and in every nursing baby. In all the fields outside of town where they were building those new houses. Especially in the fields because that’s where she was sleeping.
You’ve got to stop, Rick used to say. It’s not healthy what you’re doing. He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles were white, and he didn’t slow down to look, not even when she cried.
She stopped by the old house. She went there after every procedure. Her hands were wrapped up tight, but she could bend her fingers. Five couples since she’d sold it and at least two single mothers. Eleven children between them, and this new couple was the worst. Look at the weeds in the gravel bed and how the trim was peeling. The garbage can was tipped sideways on the curb, and that was where it stayed. She parked across the street and watched the kids play in the yard. A fat little girl and her blond brother. The mother didn’t watch them the way she should. They chased each other up and down the sidewalk, and she needed to be more careful.
She opened the car windows because it was getting warm. She leaned back in her seat, and she felt the blood beating in her hands. It hurt more than the other procedures, even more than when they lifted her jaw and set the hooks behind her ears. It hurt and the sky was clear and how many hours had she spent in that yard planting bulbs with Jenny. How many summer afternoons running through the sprinklers. The first lilies were blooming on the corner where old Mrs. Lucas used to live. She worked the beds every day and that was where they found her. The neighborhood was the same, one brick rancher after the next, but the city was growing around it. All those new wood houses with their pastel colors and dirty asphalt shingles. They spread over the fields where the cottonwood trees used to flower. Every day the concrete mixers drove up and down Academy. They poured the slabs in the empty fields and the city unfolded itself like a map. It pressed against the mountains. The concrete covered all the places Jenny had ever been and the place where she might be.
She was having a bad reaction. Two weeks of swelling, and her hands were wrapped in gauze because she didn’t want to see them. Two weeks of dropping the phone and fumbling with the doorknobs. Her mother came and washed her laundry. She brought lentil soup and garlic mashed potatoes.
“I just don’t understand you,” her mother told her. “I don’t think I ever will.”
They ate together on the sofa, and Carol dropped her spoon. She picked it up and wiped it on her shirt, and her mother shook her head.
“You can’t go on like this,” her mother said. “You’re oranger than a pumpkin.”
Carol blew over the surface of the soup the way she used to when she was little.
Her mother was wrong. She could go on like this forever. “You oversalted it this time,” Carol said. “Or maybe it’s the ham.”
Her mother did the dishes. She ran the vacuum, too, and mopped the bathroom tiles. “Quit punishing yourself,” her mother said. She knelt in the shower stall, and Carol felt ashamed to see her mother working the brush. Her hip had gotten worse. The doctors were saying it was time to get a new one, but her mother said it was a racket. Those joints were probably made in China and they’d break easier than bones. They’d chip like teacups. She cleaned the shower and scrubbed the toilet bowl because it was getting a ring, and Carol stood beside the bucket with her bandaged hands.
“They found that girl in Littleton,” Carol said. Twenty years in a garden shed, and the police brought her back home. She was alive and her baby was, too, and time had stopped for her while she was gone. She came out, and the world was changed. Who knew if she recognized her mother’s face.
“They need to leave those folks alone.” Her mother pushed herself up, and her hip cracked just like a shot. “Always following them around with cameras.” She started in about the cemetery again. How Carol should go visit. It was healthier than watching all those crime shows. It didn’t matter if the grave was empty. People didn’t go to the cemetery to visit the dead. They went to visit their memories. She talked to Herman every week there and told him about his girl. How she was a bookkeeper and how she’d worked her way through college.
Her mother rested on the sofa when she was done cleaning. She propped up her hips with cushions. Carol sat beside her, and the light was gentle in the room. “He’d be proud of you,” her mother said. She stroked the hair from Carol’s eyes. “He always said you were good with numbers.” She held Carol’s hands, but gently, gently. She pressed them against her heart.
The blood came back once the swelling had subsided. It found its way to another vein, and that vein broke through the surface. She went to see Dr. Ashrawi as soon as she saw the bulge inside her skin. “That can happen,” the doctor said. “I see it in twenty percent of patients.” He looked at her right hand because it was worse than her left. He held it like a suitor asking her to dance.
He talked about other options and diminishing returns. They could try sclerotherapy. Just a couple of injections and the vein seals shut. It turns into a scar beneath the skin. There could be cramps after the treatments and a few broken blood vessels. “The results are typically good,” the doctor said. “But there are no guarantees.” His voice was deep and wavered a little, and she wondered what he sounded like when he spoke his native language. It was probably sunny in Lebanon. The women were all beautiful, and the air smelled sweet from the oranges.
Sclerotherapy or maybe vein removal. They could cut them out, all of them, and her hands would be smooth, but then she’d have some scarring and pain from the stitches. The doctor talked and he looked only at her for those few minutes. The world slowed, and the phones went quiet in the hall. It was just the two of them and nobody else, not even his pretty receptionist who looked like one of the ladies in the brochures. Her perfect oval of a face and skin that never saw the sun. Her mother talked about Dr. Dyer and finding your way forward, but the answers were all right here. In this quiet office where the ladies sat in plush chairs and waited for their consultations. Vases with orchids submerged in water and soft music coming through the speakers and she’d stay here all day if she could. This doctor would help her and if he changed his mind, she would find another and another. She had a high pain threshold. She never felt a thing.
She wrapped her hands when she got to the car. She didn’t want to see them. She should clean her apartment and pay her bills and wash her dirty Jetta. All these things, and she drove instead. It was April, and in another month her girl would be twenty-nine. Whole satellite cities had grown up north. More people were coming from California, and pretty soon there’d be no place to put them. Down the freeway and off at Academy and back to the old neighborhood. Past the old house and the medical buildings where the Kmart used to be. Past the Printers Home and up the winding street and through those iron gates. Of all the empty fields in the city this is the one where she knew she wouldn’t find her girl.
Paradiso, Himalayan Black. Indian Aurora. The stones came from India and Greece. The sun warmed them when it shined. She touched them as she walked the rows. She’d picked the prettiest one. She’d spent hours with the brochures. The grass was wet from the sprinklers, and her boot heels sank into the muddy patches. Let it be warm where her baby was. Her baby whose hands were always cold. Who needed the heavy blanket even in summer. She slept like an Egyptian with her arms folded across her chest. All that granite and the winters didn’t touch it. Not the April sun.
She read the names and the dates, and they all had lived longer than her Jenny. One woman two rows over was born in 1897 and Jenny was lost before her. Soon there’d be no one who would remember her. Her grandma would die and Carol, too, and Jenny would die with them. She had no brothers or sisters. Every person who walks the earth leaves behind a mark. Her mother said this, and maybe she believed it. But what mark could Jenny leave when she was only seven? Her classmates were parents now and her teachers were all retired, and nobody would remember her in another thirty years. No one would say her name.
She pressed her hands together. The blood comes back when you’re living. It always finds its way. The city was pulsing around her. The cars drove by so fast just outside the gates. The Cinema 70 was a Kawasaki dealership now. The movies they’d watched together, and all those velvet seats were gone. Sirens sounded from the fire station down on Circle, and she felt her heart beating. Her mother was almost eighty, and her grandmother had been ninety-four when she passed. The women in her family lived to an old old age.
She sat down on a bench across from Jenny’s marker. It was noon and the sun was shining, and one of the maple trees was early and coming into bud. Conjure the memories. Bring them to the surface. This was the city where her girl was born. Her name was Jennifer Lee Bishop. She was a second grader at the Monroe School and she swung on the monkey bars. Her hair flew upward in a tangle. It smelled like berries from her shampoo. They went to Fargo’s for their pizzas and the numbers appeared in the mirror. Skating at the Broadmoor rink before they tore it down and Jenny had bumped into Scotty Hamilton there once and spilled Pepsi on his jacket. She never watched where she was going. Both her front teeth were chipped. This was the city and these were the things her girl had touched, and she looked at her wrapped hands.