Ragged Company (32 page)

“I left it there,” Timber said.

“You did?”

“Yes. The last time I went to see her. It was all I had left of our life together. I couldn’t just throw it away, so I brought it to
the hospital. I don’t know why. It just felt like the right thing to do.”

“Well, it certainly helped.”

“It did?”

“Yes. The day she remembered the plant’s name, Dad was ecstatic at dinner. Ecstatic. Eudora. I remember now. After Eudora Welty, the writer.”

“Yes. We loved her. Strange now to think that our favourite novel was called
Losing Battles.
”

“But you didn’t lose.”

“What?”

“You have the memories. No matter what happens, you have the memories. You came back here from the nowhere you’ve been living in for a reason, Mr. Hohnstein. Whatever those memories are, they’re good. Because you came back. Because you returned to reclaim them. Some patients pay me a great deal of money to reclaim their memories. It’s a big deal.”

“Even if I don’t find her?”

“Even if you don’t find her.”

“That’s not much comfort.”

“It will be, Mr. Hohnstein. It will be.”

“It will?”

“Yes. Eventually, it will be. In fact, do you know what?”

“No.”

“I just remembered that my dad kept a personal journal of his work with your wife. That’s how much she meant to him. He kept a personal journal of it. Would you like it?”

Timber just stared at him. Stared at him with a face as stunned into immobility as I’ve ever seen. MacBeth just nodded, clapped him lightly on the shoulder, and crossed the room to a credenza in the corner. He rummaged around the shelves and returned with a worn, leather-bound journal.

“Here it is,” he said. “I’ve never read it. I don’t know what it says or whether it can help you much at all. But I do know that my dad would want you to have it. He cared about her. He really cared. It’s the best I can do.”

Timber held the journal in his hands, turning it over and over, rubbing its surface with his palms. When he looked up, he was crying.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Hohnstein. Welcome back.”

I
T
’
S HARD TO READ
the words of a man who loved your wife. Even a wife you dispossessed. Even a woman you deserted. Reading the doctor’s journal that afternoon in my room, I knew that he had loved her. Not in any romantic way, not in any needy, weird kind of way, but just loved her for who he saw—a woman struggling through the blackness, a beautiful woman reaching out for vague clues that eluded her as quickly as they appeared, a woman barricaded from herself by the thick bricks of amnesia. An abandoned woman. Even though she did not know that, the doctor did, and it made him even more desperate to see her through to reclaim herself from the darkness. He came to love the way she squinted into the corners of her room when he spoke with her, the pinched look I remembered that had always told me she was seeing everything. He came to love the way she stared into the mirror at her face and traced its outline with the tips of her fingers as if trying to coax recollection from the lines and hollows. He came to love the way she watched people as they spoke, as though the words themselves, the air they moved, had shape and substance and clues for her. He loved the way she grabbed at the world around her.

They found the photo album I had brought while she still lay in her coma. I’d forgotten that. I’d sit there night after night and hold the snapshots up to her face and describe the day, the place, the happenings involved in each of them, hoping against hope that something in that effort would chase away the darkness, encourage the light. It had sat among her belongings until they moved her to a small four-bed care home that Dr. MacBeth used
for severe cases. He had absorbed the cost himself. When they began to lay out the things I had brought, they discovered the photo album. Sylvan did not react at first, merely stared at it like she stared at everything, uncomprehending and vacant. Then, as the doctor began the practice of thumbing through the pages with her, she began to show signs of ownership. He found her one day, alone on the veranda, tracing the faces of people in the photographs like she traced her own in the mirror. She was quiet, staring at the snapshots with a calm, assured look, a trusting look, as though she believed her fingers could divine identity, conjure time and place, gather them in her lap like a child’s building blocks, allow her to build a simple structure of a life. It made me cry. The vision of her tracing the lines of my face softly, tenderly, like she had on those nights in our bed as I eased into sleep comforted by the delicate buds of her fingers, made me weep, deeply and disconsolately, until only the reading itself could ease my pain. She touched me every day like that, and the doctor wrote about the change in her look from trusting and innocent to frustrated and sad, the snapshots a captured world she could not re-enter.

“Me,” she said one day, pointing to herself. “Sylvan.”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “Yes, yes. Sylvan.”

After that, she seemed to progress. She became able to remember from day to day. She became able to recall the names of her caregivers, her address, the date, the times of her favourite television shows and why she enjoyed them, simple day-to-day things that gave the doctor great hope. But she never remembered me. When I read that, I felt the heartbreak I had felt so many years ago all over again, full and thick in my chest, an unbearable weight pulling me to depths I recollected clearly enough. I read on. He would point to me and say, “Jonas.” She would repeat it, touching my image, saying, “Jonas. Jonas. Jonas.” Over and over again like a spell. Then she would look at him with trembling lips and the deepest, saddest eyes he’d ever seen and slowly shake her head.
Jonas
was just a word, a push of air, a label on an empty package. I drank then. Drank deeply and deliberately, waiting for the burn
in the belly to steel me for whatever came next in the doctor’s small, neatly formed words.

I read on all through that afternoon. I read about the pulling together of my wife’s small world. I read about her growing ability to manage time. Present time. The past a shadow just beyond her optic range, a fleeting thing, tempting in its closeness but elusive, wild, unsnared, uncaptured, and roaming forever beyond her grasp. The doctor gave me her world and I immersed myself in it, grateful for the chance to see her live again, to be vital. And as I worked my sad way through those pages, I relearned love, felt it spill open within me, drenching me in its warmth, a fluid thick, viscous, essential as blood.

Sometime that evening I walked into Granite’s room, where everyone had gathered to watch a movie. The journal was tucked beneath my arm. They looked at me warily, concerned, worried. I took a seat on the arm of the sofa.

“Are you okay?” Amelia asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Did that book give you anything you could use there, pal?” Digger asked.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, it did.”

“Like what, Timber?” Granite asked.

“Like an address,” I said. “Like an address.”

S
HE LIVED
in a cottage in a city by the sea. She was an old woman. She had made a long journey through the darkness and memories had been like stones she bumped her foot against, shadowed, hard, unmoving, giving nothing back, not even light. There had been a man to help her travel. A man, gentle and wise, who tried to teach her to gather up the stones in the road, hold them up to the pale glow of the moon and make them known. But she was frail and tired, scared and alone, and the heft of stones became an awkward, uncomfortable act. So he let her be,
walking behind her as she travelled that darkened road, always wondering if somehow the stars might lead her to the distant horizon where the light was born. They never did. She was destined to always be a nomad on that road. The stones about her feet, untouched and unclaimed, lay forever dormant and told no stories of their own, sang no histories. So she found her way to a cottage by the sea and there, washed in the sound of waves, the birds, the laughter of other peoples’ children in the surf, and wind keening across the sky, she learned to leave the darkened road behind and exist in a new light in a new world. There were no stones on the beaches of her mind. She was an old woman in a cottage by the sea.

L
OVE STORIES
should always be told like Cyrano de fucking Bergerac. We seen this flick, this French flick about this big-nosed motherfucker who is the country’s greatest swordsman. Tough son of a bitch who tells jokes while he’s fighting six or seven guys. My kind of guy. But he falls in love with his friggin’ cousin. Head over heels, puppy dog–eyed in love, and he’s fucked. Roxanne. Roxie. Great name. Kinda like a stripper’s name or maybe a big blond biker broad. But she’s his cousin. Anyways, he’s an ugly motherfucker and he knows that Roxanne would never have anything to do with him on accounta he’s so friggin’ ugly with a nose the size of a baked potato. So he gets a big strappin’ handsome lad to declare his love for her while Cyrano feeds him lines from the bushes. It all goes to hell. Roxie falls in love with the handsome lad and Cyrano dies after getting wounded in a sword fight. But not until he takes out about eighty guys. Love oughta be told like that. It hurts like a blade under the ribs, I’m told, so I figure if you’re gonna tell it, tell it like it is. Who knows? Mighta helped old Cyrano.

I’m thinking this while we’re driving out to see Timber’s woman. He’s sitting there beside me having a good knock out of a bottle and I can tell he’s getting ready for anything. Good.
Maybe he won’t get a chance to take out eighty guys before he falls but it’s good to be prepared. Not that I know he’s gonna go down on this, but if love hurts like they all say, don’t go in unprepared. If you know you’re gonna be shanked before the shanking happens, it helps to be a little pissed off first. Or a little pissed. Either ways, a good way to go.

We swing out of the downtown and move into an area kind of like the one we were in when we found Timber’s old house. Nice. Kinda like Indian Road, so I figure good folks gotta live out here. Every now and then I see the ocean through the houses and trees and I feel good because I never saw an ocean before. Big mystery, oceans. Always been a big mystery to me because I never seen one. We start slowing down when we pull into a little curved road that runs along a cliff overlooking the big water. The houses are mostly small with a huge mansion-looking place thrown in now and again. Everyone is eyeballing them, wondering which one is the one we’re looking for. Turns out that it’s a little place with a wraparound veranda, all lit up in the night, warm-looking and cozy. A nice place. A home.

There’s two people sitting out there in rocking chairs with blankets wrapped around their shoulders. I look over at Timber and he’s staring at them. Hard. Not moving. Not even blinking. I can tell they seen the car because they put their heads closer together, talking about it and obviously wondering what a big limo’s doing pulling up in front of their house. None of us know what to do. We’re waiting for Timber to make a move, and just when I’m wondering if he’s going to change his mind and tell the driver to take us back to the hotel, he heaves a big breath and turns his head to look at us.

“Now or never,” he goes.

“Guess so,” I go.

“You ready for this?”

“I’m not the one that’s gotta be ready, pal.”

“Yeah.”

We step out of the car and into the salty air. I can see the two people on the veranda gesturing toward us, and when Timber
starts walking to their gate they both look at us with their heads cocked like pointer dogs. He stopped with his hand on the latch. I put a hand on his shoulder and can feel him shaking.

“It’s okay, pal,” I go. “We’re here.”

He breathes out loudly, pushes the gate, and steps through into the yard.

“Good evening,” the guy calls out. “Can we help you?”

Timber keeps on walking toward the veranda stairs. He’s stiff in the back like someone’s got a gun to his ribs, his hands dangling at his sides. The rest of us kinda wander after him like kids on a field trip. He climbs the three steps to the veranda and just kinda stands there looking at the two people, a man and a woman, still wrapped in their blankets and drinking coffee from steaming white mugs. The man looks at us evenly, not too worried about these five strangers stepping out of their fancy car to pay a late-night visit. The woman stares too, but she’s squinting hard. Even in the dim light of the veranda I can tell she’s a babe. An old babe, but still a babe. She stares at us hard but doesn’t say a word, nothing moves in her face.

“Hello,” Timber goes.

“Good evening,” the man goes.

“Hello, Jonas,” the woman goes, and I have to catch Timber before he falls off the fucking steps.

S
HE LIVED
. She lived and she breathed and she walked and she talked and she spoke my name. She spoke my name. I felt my knees buckle when I heard it and Digger pushed both hands into my back to keep me upright. “Hello, Jonas,” she said, like I’d come back from the store with milk or something. Casual. Light. Not cutting through a tangle of years or anything, just “Hello, Jonas,” and those two words were enough to tumble me. Two words I thought I would never hear again. Two words that still had the power they had the first time I ever heard them come
from that lovely face. I straightened myself on the steps, grabbed ahold of the handrail and pulled myself square again, with Digger pressing from behind. When I stood, my knees were shaking and I didn’t know what to do with my hands. They felt like paddles at the end of my arms. I stood there looking at the two of them in their rocking chairs with blankets about their shoulders like the old couple I used to imagine Sylvan and I would become.

“You know who I am?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said lightly. “I have your picture in my house.”

“You do?”

“Oh, yes. Lyn told me to keep it out.”

“You remember me?”