Cece did not remember exactly when the whispering had started, though she remembered what she’d been doing at the time: walking Aristotle on the forest road behind the house. A human voice, frail but urgent—or so it sounded. She’d stopped in the middle of the road to listen. She’d imagined plenty of things in her life, usually when she’d had trouble sleeping and felt like she hadn’t fully decamped from her dreams. But this was different. The whispering did not spring from her head, she was sure of it, though neither did it seem to spring from anywhere else. It was just there at her ear, private as a secret. Cece couldn’t make out the words: only the sound itself, wish wish wish, like someone muttering in their sleep.
She’d heard it again last weekend, hiking in Jewel Basin. Maybe this was why she’d taken a wrong turn on a trail she’d hiked fifty times before. Or maybe it was something else entirely. In any case, she’d gotten lost. She’d meant to stop at Picnic Lakes for lunch, a painless four-mile loop, but had somehow hiked past them without noticing; when she tried to retrace her steps, she ended up on a trail she’d never seen before, switchbacking into a burned-out ravine overgrown with fireweed. She was almost out of water and hadn’t thought to bring a map with her. Cece sat in the fireweed and tried not to panic. She’d felt this way as a girl once, separated from her parents at Disneyland: as if she’d stepped through a door somehow, into a perilous alien world. She could die in this world. It was September and beginning to get cold in the mountains—though not as cold as it used to get, when you had to pack for surprise snowstorms—and Cece could see her breath. It misted in front of her, vanishing almost as soon as it appeared.
She got up again and wandered for a long time before encountering another hiker, a park ranger, who shared his water with her and escorted her back to Picnic Lakes. She’d met the ranger before, through Garrett—but Cece was too humiliated to bring this up. By the time she got back to the trailhead, it was an hour past dark. Garrett, waiting for her at home, had been about to go out looking.
This wasn’t the first mistake she’d made. It was the second or third. There had been the morning she’d yelled at Garrett for losing Aristotle’s food dish, even though Cece was the one who fed him twice a day and gave him his pills. Well, turns out she’d put the dish, full of kibble, in the fridge! Who would do such a thing? Or the time she was making Moroccan chicken for dinner and couldn’t seem to follow the recipe, as if it had transformed itself, maliciously, into an algebra problem. She got so tangled up in the steps that she felt like crying.
But it was the hiking fiasco that had made Garrett insist she call the doctor. She hadn’t even told him about the whispering. But she’d called and talked to her general practitioner—or at least her GP’s receptionist, who’d set up an appointment with someone new. Her old GP, who for years had been telling her to get more flavonoids into her diet, flavonoids this and flavonoids that—Cece and Garrett had called him Flavor Flav—had apparently died.
“Oh my god,” Garrett said. “How did he die?”
“Pancreatic cancer. Very sudden, she said.” Cece looked at him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You were about to say something about flavonoids, weren’t you? Make a joke.”
“I wasn’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”
“You and your wolverines!”
What did she mean by this? Even Cece didn’t know. He’d basically retired—hadn’t gone wolverining in several years. Garrett ended up driving her to the doctor’s office; not only that, he insisted on accompanying her to the lobby and waiting like a concerned parent while she had her appointment. Dr. Plattner, her new GP, found Cece in an examination room. The doctor was young—fresh off her residency, it looked like—and had the sort of freckled outdoorsy face Cece associated with ski lift operators, people who thought being a birth coach someday would be super rewarding and maybe found couples over sixty “cute.” That was the vibe Cece was getting. A kind of snowboarder-with-a-heart-of-gold thing. She wasn’t being fair, but Cece didn’t care. It had been hard enough to admit to the receptionist why she’d wanted an appointment; now she had to repeat the story about getting lost in the woods to this thirty-year-old Patagonia model. She found herself downplaying it, failing to mention the whispering or the fact that she’d run out of water. Turning it into an anecdote, a funny thing you might tell at a party. At some point, Cece realized that Dr. Plattner had already heard the story from her receptionist and was perhaps weighing the discrepancies between the two versions.
“Is there a history of dementia in your family?”
“No,” Cece said before explaining how her mother had died. “My grandmother lived to be eighty-seven, sharp as a tack. And my dad died of a heart attack…at sixty.”
“And his parents?”
“I’m not sure. He was estranged from them. His dad was kind of bonkers.”
“Bonkers?”
“Head trauma, they think—got mugged on a trip to Europe and was beaten with his own umbrella…” She trailed off. Dr. Plattner was staring at her. Only now did it occur to her that this story might be suspicious: a way of explaining something less fathomable.
“What I’d like to do is give you a short three-part test,” Dr. Plattner said. “But it’s important not to jump to any conclusions about the results. It’s not a diagnosis or anything, just a way of seeing if maybe we should investigate further.”
“What kind of a test?”
“It’s called the Mini-Cog.”
“As in ‘miniature cognition’?”
“I believe so,” Dr. Plattner said, smiling.
Cece was showing off. Of course, this whole thing was absurd. So why was she so nervous? Her hands were trembling.
Dr. Plattner asked her to repeat three words. “Apple,” “house,” “chair.”
Cece laughed. “That’s it?”
“Please repeat them if you can.”
“Apple, house, chair,” Cece said genially. She felt a wave of relief. Dr. Plattner handed her a pen and some paper, then asked her to draw a clock.
“A clock?”
“A clock like you might see on the wall. Draw it so it says eleven ten, please.”
“A.m. or p.m.?”
“Good question. Hmmm. I guess it doesn’t matter, does it?”
Cece drew a circle, then hesitated. When was the last time she’d seen an actual clock? They didn’t have one at home. And she’d never worn a watch in her life. Cece wrote in the numbers no problem, beginning with the “12” at the top and working her way around full circle, 2-3-4, etc., all the way to 11, but when it came time to draw the hands she had some trouble picturing their positions. She drew the long hand pointing at the 11, then realized it would be the short hand, then realized it would have to point not directly at the 11 but somewhere between the 11 and the 12. And the long hand would be at the 10. No, the 1. No, 2! By the time she’d finished, she’d drawn so many hands that the clock looked like a bicycle wheel.
“I’m sorry,” she said, flustered. Her heart was pounding. “It’s been a very long time since I looked at an actual clock.”
“Of course. Anyway, you did fine.”
“How is that fine?” Cece said, close to tears.
Later, Dr. Plattner asked her to repeat the three words she’d told her to memorize earlier.
“House, apple…,” Cece said. “House, apple…” Something curdled in her throat. What was the third one? Jesus Christ, hadn’t she been paying attention? Her tongue felt strange in her mouth. “Could you repeat the words?”
“I’m afraid not, sorry,” Dr. Plattner said.
“Ha, right. It’s just that it took a lot longer to do the clock than I thought. It distracted me from what you said earlier.” She looked at Dr. Plattner, realizing that that was the whole point of the clock test. Or one of them. The examination room, with its charts and strange instruments, had started to look unreal, almost sinister. “Thing is, I remember so many things. Almost everything. Random facts I’ve learned. Like in World War I, if a soldier lost his nose in battle—did you know this?—if a soldier lost his nose somehow, like in a blast, surgeons would sew one of his fingers to his face. Attach it to the place where his nose used to be. Then, when it grafted to his face, they’d cut off his finger and leave it there.”
Dr. Plattner stared at her.
“You don’t believe me?”
“It just sounds, I don’t know, far-fetched.”
“It’s true,” Cece said.
Dr. Plattner jotted something down on her chart. Infuriatingly, she was still smiling. “I guess plastic surgery’s come a long way.”
“Rhinoplasty, yes. Leaps and bounds.” Cece blushed. Why was she talking this way? Dr. Plattner scribbled something else in her chart. “I don’t know why I mentioned it. Still. Just funny to think about. Like I wonder if their noses were…ugh, what do you call it? Able to grab things? Like an elephant’s trunk.”
Dr. Plattner nodded at her. Then she said she was going to refer Cece to a neuropsychologist. The results of the test didn’t mean anything at this point. It was important to remember that. But she thought it would be a good idea to see another doctor, a specialist, for further evaluation. She handed Cece a pamphlet, explaining that it was about ways to keep her brain healthy. The pamphlet was called The Six Pillars of Alzheimer’s Prevention.
“I want a different doctor,” Cece fumed after she’d walked with Garrett to the car. The computer display on the VW was black again, failing to respond at all; they waited for it to reboot. Who was giving the car cognition tests? Humiliating it for no rhyme or reason? She crumpled the pamphlet, unread, and threw it on the floor.
“What did she do?”
“Made me draw a clock!”
Garrett looked at her.
“I mean, when’s the last time you even saw a clock? Anyway, I know how to draw one. It’s just that I got flustered. More and more flustered. And I kept fucking up. I told her, ‘We don’t have any wall clocks at home!’ ”
“That’s true.”
“I told her about the nose thing, how they used to replace soldiers’ noses with their own fingers in World War I. Didn’t they used to do that?”
“Why in god’s name did you tell her that?”
“I don’t know!” She started to cry. “And then I couldn’t think of that word. I was joking about having a nose like a finger. One that you could move around. But I couldn’t think of the name for it. For an elephant’s trunk—you know, how it can grab things on its own?”
“Prehensile?”
Cece stiffened, as if he’d somehow betrayed her. He was her life’s companion. Her mother had died and she’d landed somehow at his feet. She’d seen a comic strip once of a doctor snipping an umbilical cord: the baby gusted around the delivery room losing air, like a balloon deflating.
“I forget words like that all the time,” Garrett said.
Dr. Plattner emerged from the building with another white-coated woman, perhaps on their way to lunch.
“Look! There she is. God, I fucking hate her.”
“Which? Putting on sunglasses?”
“I could strangle her with my bare hands,” Cece said.
Garrett looked at the pleasant-looking woman in sunglasses crossing the parking lot. He was scared—a cold, embryonic fear—but he didn’t tell Cece that. He had a pathological need to cheer her up. To make her laugh. It was not the opposite of fear but its demented companion. It was marriage. He put his hand where his nose was, hiding it with his fist, then lifted one finger slowly, flipping Dr. Plattner the bird.
Before this—before she’d gotten lost in the wilderness and then failed a stupid test at the doctor’s—Cece had been waking up with a feeling of sunshine on her face. Not sunlight through the window, but bona fide sunshine. She’d lie there for a bit while Garrett slept, feeling that pleasant tingling warmth on her face, like a mask you never want to take off. It was nothing like the sun actually felt these days, its oven-y scorch. No, it was a feeling from her childhood, back when she and the sun were friends. That old approving warmth in her body.
Cece wondered if this meant she was happy. Who knew? She’d never really understood what was meant by it, happiness, except in relationship to being unhappy. Sometimes she’d lie in bed and imagine the mysterious warm feeling was coming from the little sun in the orrery on her dresser, the one Garrett had given her for their anniversary. She used to move the miniature planets around every day, for no real reason—though she hadn’t in years and the brass arms had rusted fast, or at least Earth’s had. It had gotten stuck where it was: isolated from the other planets, like a reject at school. Cece loved the orrery but particularly the reject Earth. It was painted like a tiny globe, with continents and everything. They’d had a cat for a while—Bucket—who used to hang out on the dresser and lick the meticulous planets, especially Earth, which for some reason tasted the best. Perhaps he mistook it for prey. This went on for a long time, weeks, before Garrett mentioned the paint was probably full of lead.
Bucket was with Lana now, enjoying a lead-free retirement. Sometimes Cece thought of the two of them in LA, sheltering in Lana’s Spanish Colonial flat, and missed Lana so much her heart grabbed. She could visit any time she wanted to, of course. Cece used to love going to see her, insisting they spend every second soaking up the city, going to restaurants or bakeries—real tacos! real croissants!—or catching movies that would never make it to Salish. Lately, though, she found herself insisting Lana fly to Montana instead. The traffic, the constant fires, the haze of hipness that seemed more and more like the punch line to a joke everyone had forgotten. After a day or two, she’d find herself longing for their humble house in the country, the crunch of gravel under the VW’s tires and Aristotle’s bulleting out of the gate like a racehorse, the view of Mount Aeneas in the distance making whatever you’d just bought in town seem slightly foolish, even perverse.
Provided it wasn’t a red-alert day and you could see the peak at all. Cece often felt guilty for feeling happy—or whatever you wanted to call it—given the state of things. You couldn’t read The New York Times without despairing at the latest drastic revelation and also somehow feeling like it was redundant, like you knew about it beforehand. Heat deaths in London? Devastating monsoons in Pakistan? Hundred-year floods, wreaking havoc in Lima and Dar es Salaam? Another fascist prick here in the States, riding the migrant crisis to power? Everyone knew these things would happen, smart people had been predicting them for years, and yet the world—or at least the assholes running it—seemed uninterested in stopping them. So she’d given it up: the news. She wouldn’t even listen to it in the car.
This summer, instead of fires, they’d been battered by storms. Everything would be calm and clear and lovely, the world as tranquil as a picnic, a few dark clouds lounging in the distance, then Aristotle would start to whine and cower and circle the porch, the sky darkening like an eclipse, the clouds gathering into a mass, thundering impatiently, beginning a cavalry charge toward the house, and then boom: ninety-mile-per hour winds. This was the real news, delivered to your doorstep. Rain would machine-gun the windows, flooding the house. Cece and Garrett would spend the next couple hours wringing out towels, trying to keep the rain from pooling on the floors. Never before had they so much as leaked, the windows, but everyone said this now: never before, never before. Never before had so many trees come down. The force involved! Two-hundred-foot spruces and pines, ripped out of the ground like weeds. It was no longer a matter of whether a power line would be taken out, but how many lines. There’d been so many blackouts this year, Cece had lost count. They seemed to last longer each time, which meant the well pump was out of commission sometimes for days; Cece and Garrett would run around the house like the Marx Brothers, slipping on rain-flooded floors, filling every container they could find with water before the pressure dried up.
Now, after failing Dr. Plattner’s test, she dropped Garrett at home and drove into town with Aristotle in the back, feeling guilty for blasting the air-conditioning. Eighty-five degrees. Yesterday the high had been fifty-one. Cece stopped at a red light outside of town, behind a van with the logo of a smiling house on it. A cleanup service, for water and fire damage. You saw more and more of these trucks: a booming industry.
She parked in the lot behind the bookstore, next to the gas-powered Jeep that Lexie had inherited from her parents. The Jeep was mosaiced in bumper stickers that Cece didn’t understand, derived—she suspected—from internet memes. A unicorn with a marshmallow impaled on its horn. Submit to the Kumquat. An Adam and Eve with their genitalia transposed, which Cece guessed had to do with genderism, or Christofascism, or both. Probably this didn’t make Lexie’s life easy in Salish, though of course the girl didn’t live in Salish—she lived in her phone.
“How’s it going?” Cece asked. It was Monday, a notoriously slow day for customers.
Lexie did not look up from her Origami, which she’d unfolded to the size of a greeting card. Cece tried not to be offended by this. She used to tell Lexie to turn off her phone, until she realized that no part of the command was legible to her. Nobody turned their Origami off; it was impossible. Also, no one under the age of forty called them phones. “Did you know that moths drink the tears of sleeping birds?”
“According to whom?”
“According to science,” Lexie said. “To moths.”
“I did not know that.”
Cece waited in vain for a report of the morning, watching Lexie fold her phone into a pyramid and perch it delicately on the counter. Of course, this was where she’d heard the thing about the finger-replacement surgery: from Lexie herself. The girl sometimes seemed less like a human being and more like a backup drive for her Origami. She was lovely and thin as a heron and quite possibly a lunatic. When she wasn’t reading her phone, she was whitening her teeth. You could basically see by them at night. Cece wondered if maybe she loved her Origami so much she was trying to turn herself into one.
Naturally, from Lexie’s perspective, Cece was the one who was insane. Why else would she own a bookstore? Sometimes Cece wondered this herself. And yet the place was still in business, despite an endless parade of salesclerks: Meadow, the Buddhist, who’d vanished one day and then sent Cece a cryptic email from Peru; Guthrie, sweet lunk of a river guide, whose favorite book was The Essential Calvin and Hobbes; Nisha (wonderful Nisha!), who actually knew something about literature and could quote Roland Barthes; Dwindle Grimes, of the Dickensian name, which somehow sounded the way he made the employee bathroom smell; and now Lexie, twenty-year-old college student, home for the summer to visit her phone. (Cece had hired her largely on the basis of her bumper stickers.) Somehow the Light at the End of the Dock had survived them all—was, in fact, doing better than ever, even though it hadn’t changed much since Meadow worked there. Sure, Cece had made some minor adjustments: there was now a Used Books section, surprisingly lucrative in Salish, where the dearth of trash collection was a boon to used-good purveyors of all stripes. But it seemed that the dire prognoses for all things analog, for all things brick-and-mortar, had not come to pass—that maybe the book was an invention that couldn’t be improved upon. It folded in two ways: open and shut.
“I need you to place an order for me,” Cece said, ransacking her pockets for a book title she’d written down and handing the slip of paper to Lexie, who peered at it as if it were an artifact of a lost civilization.
“Who for?”
“Townsend at the coffee roasters. He asked me to get it in.”
“You mean Townes?”
“That’s what I said.” Cece stared at the glowing pyramid on the counter. On each of the three sides was the picture of a different guy, mugging drastically for the camera. One of them was shirtless—possibly naked. “I only popped in for a minute. Aristotle’s in the car. Imagine being a Newfie in this weather.”
“You could serve him a bloodsicle,” Lexie said.
“What is a bloodsicle?”
“A frozen blood Popsicle. It’s what they serve lions and tigers on very hot days.”
“Lexie, where are you getting all this from?”
Lexie shrugged. It wasn’t coyness: she sincerely didn’t know. Facts were leaking out her ears.
“Go ahead and close early today if you want. Seems slow.”
“Like when? Four o’clock?”
“Sure,” Cece said, glancing at the clock above the travel section. Yes, of course: the clock. On the wall of the bookstore. Cece saw it every day she came in. Something lodged in her throat, like a bone.
Back at the car, she picked the crumpled-up pamphlet off the floor and smoothed it across the steering wheel. She read it carefully (or tried to). She felt sick enough that it was hard to focus. Tucked among the list of behaviors meant to forestall Alzheimer’s was an anecdote about Catholic nuns; someone did a study of 678 elderly nuns, looking at essays they wrote as novitiates, when they first took their vows. The nuns who wrote the most fluent essays—using long, sophisticated, syntactically complex sentences—were the least likely to get Alzheimer’s. Idea density, the scientists called it. Journaling, therefore, was the answer! The more you journaled, boosting the density of your ideas, the less likely you were to get Alzheimer’s. But wasn’t it just as likely that there was something about the nuns’ brains to begin with, some congenital edge that impelled them to write longer sentences and ensured as an added perk that they wouldn’t ever go nuts?
And the poor nuns who got it! After all those years of worship. If marrying Jesus couldn’t keep you from going batshit crazy, then what good was a pamphlet?
Still, she folded it carefully and stuck it in the pocket of her coat.
Cece drove to the Salish River lookout and took Aristotle for a walk along the Wild Mile. It was hot and muddy on the trail, but Aristotle didn’t seem to mind, running ahead to scare up animals or find the perfect rock to pee on. Far below them, roaring like static, brimming from all the storms they were having, the river along the Wild Mile boiled and frothed; just last week a kayaker had brained himself on a rock. Aristotle, splattered with mud, flushed a ground squirrel out of a shrub. Cece remembered what the trail used to be like when they’d first moved here, teeming with butterflies in particular. Cabbage whites. Whole clouds of them, rising from the ground like snow in reverse. And the birds! Aristotle would have had a field day. It wasn’t unusual to see a ptarmigan strutting across the trail.
When’s the last time she saw a ptarmigan here? Or, for that matter, a butterfly? Now it was mostly ground squirrels, and even they were dwindling, it seemed. She thought of the verse from Genesis she’d memorized in Sunday school, the one that had struck a gong of terror in her heart. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. How could she still remember this, and not the word after “house” and “apple”? It wasn’t death that scared her so much as oblivion, the face of the deep, that missing word that she’d never retrieve. One after another, the words going poof. Not a sudden death, but a gradual one, an accretion of losses, one you were in denial about until it was too late, the way the ptarmigans and butterflies had vanished somehow without her even noticing.
Maybe the world had it too: a memory problem. The density of its ideas was in freefall. She and the earth were in this together.
Indescribable, the dread she felt. As if she were going up in smoke.
Cece followed Aristotle into a patch of June grass between the trail and the river: a much calmer stretch of water, before it funneled into the mouth of the canyon. A fly fisherman had climbed down to the river and was whipping it with his line, oblivious to their presence. Cece sat in the grass while Aristotle caught his breath, panting with his tongue out. She lay down beside him. It smelled like warm earth. The whispering started up again in her ear, near and distant somehow at the same time. She could make out the voice now, what it was saying to her. “Come closer,” it said. Yes, no doubt about it. Clear as a bell. Come closer. But it wasn’t her mother’s voice. It was like a voice from another room—or maybe from the front of the car when you’re half-asleep in back. Cece closed her eyes. She had the oddest feeling, as if she were moving up and down.
On the way home, she passed another one of those cleanup trucks—or maybe it was the same one she’d seen earlier. They were everywhere. A slogan was written across the barn doors of the van.
That night, in her dreams, she flew around. The birds cried and cried in their sleep. She was very thirsty.
She woke up late, the parched feeling still in her throat. Garrett was already up. Cece parted the curtains and saw him in the front yard, kneeling at the edge of the grass and planting some bulbs along the fence, his brown head glowing in the sun. Aristotle lay in the grass beside him, like a tipped-over pommel horse. Garrett stopped for a moment and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. How like an old man he looked, digging in his garden. It was nice to see him outside without a mask on: rare these days, at least in the summertime. He spent most of his life indoors now—exactly what he’d been afraid of, when he retired—though honestly he’d probably still be up there with his Yagi if there were any wolverines left in the park. That was the real reason he’d stopped: there was nothing to find. The search was over. Cece would never tell him this, but she was secretly glad that they’d disappeared. She liked having him around, and not merely because she got lonely without him; there was a relief to it, even a novel hint of shyness. A sense that they were left only with each other. Call it sadness or surrender. She opened the window.
“What are you planting?” she called to him.
“Money!”
Cece laughed. For some reason—no reason, really—they called daffodils this. They’d become “duckbills” long ago—surely Lana was involved—which had turned into “dollar bills,” which had evolved etymologically into “money.” (The joke, of course, was that they never had enough and so had to grow it themselves.) And it wasn’t just daffodils: they had their own secret language. Coffee had become “Carmichael,” mysteriously enough, just like sex had become “draining the tub,” dating from when Lana was small and they’d had to come up with a way of explaining why they were in the shower for so long. Cece had read about the Wixárika people in Mexico, who performed a renaming ceremony before harvesting peyote; they called the desert “ocean,” the moon “sun,” in order to enter a different world than their own. Maybe marriage was like that. Gradually you renamed the world and created a new one, one only you could enter. You turned flowers into money, took the lullaby of unexciting days and called it happiness.
Cece made some coffee for herself, then checked for texts on her old museum-piece of a phone. Lana called it her “ham radio,” presumably because it didn’t fold into shapes. Cece decided to call her. She needed to hear her daughter’s voice. She used it like a compass sometimes, the way you might orient a map.
“Mom, I’m at the studio. I can’t talk.”
“Working?”
“We’ve got to finish the assembly cut by Friday.”
“This is the film about whatever it’s called? Transpersonism?”
“Transhumanism!”
“Right. About the people trying to become computers.”
“Why can’t you ever remember the name of it?”
“The Daedalus Project,” she said proudly, then felt stupid. What was she, a game show contestant? Anyway, her daughter hadn’t been asking if she remembered the name of the film itself, which after all Lana had been working on for four years. Somehow the girl had reinvented herself: gone from being a character actor in video games to a filmmaker, a documentarian, and an acclaimed one at that. Her first film—or at least her first feature-length one, about a homeless encampment out in the Mojave Desert—had won several prizes. The New York Times had called it “profoundly moving, even visionary in its way, as if Frederick Wiseman had teamed up with Tarkovsky.” Whenever she learned of Lana’s accomplishments, Cece of course felt extremely proud and happy—though there was also, if she was completely honest, a slight queasy feeling, a jab of envy. Lana had gotten herself to LA, bent on making her mark. When one life hadn’t panned out, she’d jumped boldly into the next. And it had worked. Her boldness had paid off. She’d been more ambitious than her parents, or at least her mother, whose one true act of boldness—or what she’d mistaken for it—had revolved around love.
Marriage, the only adventure open to the cowardly.
And now here she was, feeling proud of herself for remembering the name of her own daughter’s film! “I’ve got a transhuman you might want to interview. Lexie, at the bookstore? She’s turning herself into a pho—an Origami.”
“Mom,” Lana said dismissively. “That’s not really what it’s about.”
Cece bristled. Clearly Garrett hadn’t mentioned anything to Lana—about the doctor’s visit, about Cece getting lost—or else Lana wouldn’t be talking this way to her. The fact that he’d kept it to himself made Cece even more frightened. Someone coughed in the background, then said something she couldn’t make out.
“Is someone there with you?” Cece asked. “I thought you were working.”
“Hello, Mrs. Meek,” the voice in the background said.
“It’s Mrs. Calhoun.”
“Luciana brought me lunch.”
“Is that your girlfriend?”
“She wants to know if you’re my girlfriend,” Lana said.
They both laughed. Seemed to find this quite funny. Cece couldn’t keep track of the women—and occasional men—Lana was dating. Or sleeping with. Or whatever the appropriate term for it was. Monogamy seemed to be a thing of the past, a quaint dorky custom regarded by Lana’s generation with pity and amusement, like check-writing or going to church. Was that partly Cece’s problem? That she’d been born in the wrong era? That she’d spent her life, say, collecting stamps, without realizing they were obsolete?
“Did you know that moths drink the tears of sleeping birds?”
Silence. “You called to tell me that?”
“No. I mean yes. I just called to talk.”
“Mom, I really have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“What?” Cece said, though she’d heard her perfectly.
Even though it was her day off again, Cece went by the bookstore and picked up several boxes of donations. She did this every month: thinned out the shelves of used books to make way for better ones—okay, maybe “better” wasn’t the right word, given that Edith Wharton might lose out to, say, James Patterson, but “marketable”—then delivered the culled books to Lakeview Village, the nursing home on 93. Now that he was retired, Garrett usually helped. The boxes were heavy, and Cece found that loading them into the car by herself had recently become impossible, just as other things she used to take for granted—climbing the ladder to the attic, pulling volunteer saplings up from the yard—had become physically perilous. Today she let Lexie and Garrett do the lifting while she watched from the curb. Ever since her appointment with Dr. Plattner, she’d had trouble meeting Garrett’s eyes; it had been like this when she’d first left Charlie, as if looking Garrett straight in the eye would turn them both to stone.
“Are you sure you want to get rid of More Great Pantyhose Crafts?” Garrett said, snooping through the box they’d just loaded.
“I have no idea where that came from.”
“Well, you must have bought it from someone, right? A pantyhose crafter?”
“What’s a pantyhose?” Lexie asked.
Cece looked at her, smiling. “God, I envy you.”
At Lakeview Village, they dropped the boxes off at the assisted-living wing, which had its own library. It wouldn’t have been a terrible place to end up, provided you had nowhere else to live. There was an enormous birdcage with chattering parakeets, a cozy gas fireplace blazing all year round, even a billiards table where Cece had once seen a palsied man and woman trying to sink balls, as if on a date. It was hard to imagine that people were dying in their beds—but they were, of course, if not here, then elsewhere on the premises. They died, and then the bodies had to be carted away so new people could take their rooms. There was a waiting list.
On the way back from the library, Cece stopped in front of a locked door that led to the memory care wing. Vintage Gardens, it was called. You needed a code to enter. Cece stared at the door.
“What are you doing?” Garrett asked.
“I want to check it out.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not being stupid. I’m being the opposite. Seeking knowledge.”
He shook his head, keeping his distance.
“Okay, go back to the car then,” she said.
“You’re being silly.”
“What are you waiting for? I said go back!”
The man spent his life around animals that wanted to rip his throat open, and here he was acting like a little sissy. Worse: a hypocrite. Wasn’t he the one always ranting about the future and our refusal to face it? Humans blindfolding themselves to disaster? Cece peered through the window in the door, just in time to see a guy with a tool belt beep himself through.
She grabbed the door before it closed and stepped inside, not expecting Garrett to follow. But he did. He slipped in behind her. Together, they walked down the hall into a beige communal space that resembled the lunchroom of a country club, if the country club were maybe going out of business. No billiards tables here. The walls were bare except for a few paintings of trees done in an array of styles—realist, impressionist, expressionist—like options in a catalog. Cece suspected they’d been printed off the internet. A woman in a wheelchair sat in the middle of the room, waving one hand in the air and yelling, “Help! Help me! Help!” to a nurse behind the desk, who ignored her completely. Despite being snubbed, the woman kept on yelling for help. It seemed to be expected of her.
Cece chose not to intervene, partly out of respect for the nurse and partly because she felt like a trespasser. No one paid the slightest bit of attention to her; it was as if she and Garrett didn’t exist. Gathered around a staff member, arranged in a semicircle, sat a group of five residents in varying stages of alertness. Each of them held a swimming pool noodle in their lap. Were they going for a dip? No, it was an exercise class. The staff member, a guy in a Lakeview Village shirt, was palming a balloon in one hand. “Look alive now,” he said—apparently without irony—and tossed it to one of the more alert residents, who batted the balloon with her Styrofoam noodle, keeping it aloft. “It’s all yours, Marybeth!” the staff member said to a different resident. Marybeth grinned at the sound of her name but made no effort to hit the balloon. It settled to the floor at her feet. Undaunted, the staff member picked up the balloon and turned to a different resident, a man with an intelligent face and bushy eyebrows, black as Stalin’s. He might have been a distinguished professor of economics. The staff member tossed the balloon at the man, who stared intrepidly ahead as it bounced off his face. He didn’t even flinch. Just sat there with his mouth open, like a beanbag target. Cece turned to the woman yelling for help, sensing that the woman’s eyes had fastened on her.
“Yes?” Cece said.
“Do you know when we dock in Rotterdam?”
“Dock?”
“My son’s coming to pick me up at nineteen hundred hours,” the woman said, tugging Cece’s shirtsleeve. “What if I get off in Hamburg!”
Normally, Garrett drove when the two of them were in the car, but on the way home Cece insisted on taking the wheel. She wanted to drive. Be in control for a change. She had no desire to talk to him. They rode home in silence, Garrett sipping some coffee he’d filched from the kitchen while Cece stared at the road, terror hollowing her veins. The hands on the steering wheel felt disconnected from her, otherworldly almost, as if they were someone else’s. Were they trembling? To the west loomed the recurring dream of Salish Lake, as blue as aquarium gravel. The view astonished her. She’d lived here most of her life.
Something lumbered into the road. Cece slammed on the brakes, spilling the coffee in Garrett’s hand. A black bear. It loped across the highway, clumsy almost in its lazy mechanical strength—or maybe not clumsy so much as golemlike, as if it had been born out of clay and were still mastering its limbs. Two cubs crashed out of the pines and trotted along behind it, ignoring Cece and Garrett completely. Their fur, sleek as oil, rippled in the sun. Cow and cubs took their sweet time crossing—they seemed to form one thing, the way that a comet has a tail—then disappeared into the trees on the other side of the highway.
Cece let out a breath. Weirdly, they never paid the slightest bit of attention to you, these bears. Like you weren’t even there. It was why you felt so strange afterward.
How many bears had she seen in her life? Fifty? Most people saw exactly none. Cece turned to Garrett, whose lap was soaked.
“Are you all right?” she said, frightened he’d hurt himself. “Did the coffee burn you?”
“Nope. It was cold to begin with.”
Cece pressed the gas again, edging back up to speed. The road was straight and deserted. “I want an Origami,” she said after a bit.
“Why?”
“I just do. I want one tomorrow.”
Garrett nodded, choosing to accept this. A small thing—and not small at all. Unfathomably, she started to laugh.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Just thinking about those poor zombies with their pool noodles.”
“Maybe don’t call them ‘zombies,’ ” Garrett said.
“Did you see that guy take a balloon in the face?” Cece said. “He didn’t even blink.”
“On the other hand, he was one of the few people who made contact.”
Cece looked at him.
“You ought to see him play baseball,” Garrett said innocently.
Cece laughed: a gust of relief. As long as they could still joke, everything would be okay. Ashamed, she thought about her outburst in the nursing home, when she’d yelled at him to go back to the car. Why had she been so pissed at him? Anyway, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to end up like those zombies, those people, doing balloon aerobics. If she was sure of anything, it was this. She would do everything the pamphlet prescribed. Exercise regularly. Start lifting weights. Cut out sugar, white flour, TV. Keep a journal every day, like those Catholic nuns. Learn a foreign language. No, two foreign languages. How lame was it that she couldn’t speak French? And she’d always wanted to learn Russian, to read Anna Karenina in the original. Life mattered. It had dignity and purpose. There was some part of her—a Self, an essential Cece—that was immutable. Safe from corruption. The part of her that loved to swim; that came up with dorky aphorisms; that couldn’t hear a song from her childhood, no matter how cloying or obnoxious, without leaping up to dance…What was life, if she lost that?
She wouldn’t allow it! She’d do what the pamphlet said: Become a detective. Observe the world so closely, glom on to it so fiercely, that she’d never unglom. The important thing was to record and remember.
Practice the five W’s, the pamphlet said. Keep a “who what when why where” list of all your activities.
Back at the house, Cece turned off the car while Aristotle barked at them from the yard, his muzzle wedged between the pickets of the fence. They sat there for a minute in the last light of day. Maybe it was the aftereffect of the bears, but everything looked different to her, seemed to glow damply of its own accord, as if Aristotle’s walrus face and the hydrangeas drooping over the fence and the dogwood Cece and Garrett had planted themselves thirty years ago had just plopped into the world, naked and unseen. Increasingly she had this feeling: that the world was baring itself to her for the first time.
Garrett’s head, brown as an almond, skimmed the roof of the car. He looked bigger somehow in the passenger seat: an overgrown child, knees wedged against the dash. A lamp was on in the bedroom window upstairs. Garrett was staring at it. Had she left it on herself? She was militant about conserving energy, always swept the house before they went anywhere, flipping off switches. Sometimes, out of instinct, Cece switched the lights off while Garrett was still in the room, trying to read. It drove him nuts.
He got out of the car, face bent toward the ground. Was he trying to avoid showing it to her? Of course not. Probably his knee was acting up again. He was simply minding where he stepped. Cece watched him walk, a bit haltingly, to the gate.
Who: Garrett Meek.
What: Her husband.
When: Till one of them dies.
Why: God knows; every reason; none at all.
Where: Salish, Montana. Home.