The 100 Year Miracle (16 page)

“Did you black out?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Harry laid his head back against the wall. He wasn’t even trying to get himself up, and his right leg was turned below him at an awkward angle that made her think of an ostrich with its knees bent the wrong way.

“Are you hurt?” Rachel asked.

His eyes were closed. “I fell down the stairs.”

“I inferred.”

The corners of Harry’s mouth turned up a little at the corners. The woman was frank. You had to give her that.

“I fall all the time now,” he said.

“Your disease is progressing.”

“It would seem so.”

They sat a moment in the quiet before Harry went on. “You know, I have to grab the towel rack now to lower myself onto the toilet. One of these days I’m not going to get back up.”

“Yes,” she said, “but the toilet is no more probable than any other surface.”

Harry looked at her.

She clarified. “A toilet is a chair like any other, functionally speaking. You might get stuck on a dining room chair or the sofa or in a car.”

“That really wasn’t my point.”

“I know.”

“Do you know what it’s like to be terrified of a shower?” Harry asked.

Rachel did know. Unfamiliar showers sometimes had abrupt changes in temperature, which hurt her back terribly, but she did not say this to Harry, who had continued talking without her.

“And I can’t grip a pencil. I hold it in my fist like a toddler to try to put the notes I can hear in my head on the page because, Lord knows, I can’t play them.” He was quiet a moment. “That might be the worst part.”

“The worst part changes from day to day,” Rachel said.

He had closed his eyes, and now he opened them and looked at her. “That’s true.”

Most people, Rachel knew, didn’t want you to talk about your pain, not unless it was temporary like a twisted ankle or hitting your thumb with a hammer. If you did not hold up your end of the bargain and get better, things fell apart quickly. People would avoid you. It was easier to keep hidden, and she felt sorry for Harry because he could not hide. There were not a sufficient number of high-necked jackets and fishbowls full of pills to get him through his day unseen.

“Where’s Tilda?” Rachel asked.

“She went to the store. Well, she said she went to the store. She’s probably just driving around, or maybe she went to go visit her boyfriend.”

This information didn’t fit well with the image Rachel had of the woman who had greeted her at the door that morning. She didn’t seem like the sort of woman who would have something that sounded as girlish as a “boyfriend.”

Harry glanced up at her and then looked back down either because it was embarrassing or the angle hurt his neck. “She and I had a fight. It was probably my fault.”

“Okay.”

“It was my fault.”

“Okay.”

“The good news is I don’t think I messed myself, so if you could give me a hand, I’d appreciate it.”

Rachel wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be funny or not, so she didn’t laugh. She just got hold of him under his armpits as best she could on the treacherous and uneven surface and lifted. His right leg did nothing but hang. He tried to get some leverage with his left, but it wasn’t much, and it didn’t help.

In the end, she half dragged him up the stairs, one agonizing six-inch rise at a time, with Harry pushing off from the wall and the handrail as best he could. At the top, she left him and went down to fetch his cane. When she returned, he had all his weight on his left leg and was holding up the right like an injured dog.

“Do you think it’s broken?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It’s just the knee. Torqued is all.”

“You might have torn some ligaments,” she offered, despite not being that sort of doctor. “Do you have Tilda’s cell phone number?”

He shook his head again. “No need. Just gonna rest it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m like an old dog with cancer,” Harry said. “There’s no point in going to a lot of trouble fixing things.” He had to stop and take another couple of sips of air. “Just need one second here.”

Rachel had done the same thing how many times? A thousand. More than a thousand. Her mind began to whirl, slowly at first like an engine warming up, but soon she was making calculations so quickly she thought for sure the zipping of her neurons would be audible. She could help him. She could alleviate some, maybe even all, of his pain, and she could—this was the important part—collect more data. A sample size of one wasn’t really a sample size at all, but still, the risk was enormous. She would need to mitigate it. She would need to get information from him without giving any out.

“Stay here,” she told him.

“Afraid you won’t be able to catch me?” he asked, but she didn’t respond. She was already down the hall and on the other side of her bedroom door, shutting it behind her.

When she came back, she had a white plastic spoon, the kind with sharp edges that can be found in every fast-food restaurant in the world. On it was a small lump of reddish-brown paste, not unlike the filling in the middle of a Fig Newton but a little lighter in color.

“I have this,” she said.

He looked at the spoon and the lump.

“It’s a new painkiller, one I developed. Am developing. Stronger than morphine.”

Harry wrinkled his nose. “Did you find it on the bottom of your shoe?”

She didn’t answer that. “It’s experimental, and there are side effects. Some I know and some I probably don’t.”

Rachel had the feeling that she was stepping off a ledge into pure black, and Harry wasn’t saying anything. She didn’t know what that meant. She rarely knew what anyone meant by anything, and she was starting to feel very self-conscious standing there holding a plastic spoon with a disgusting lump in the bowl. Harry didn’t know her from anyone, and it did look like something off the bottom of her shoe.

“Anyway,” she said, lowering it. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t discuss it with anyone.”

She wanted to turn away and go. She could feel herself begin to blush, and the humiliation of blushing only increased the embarrassment and hurried the process. Harry would have to fend for himself. She backed a step away and went to spin on her heel.

“Have you tried it?” Harry asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Better than morphine?” he asked.

“Better is subjective. It’s stronger.”

He held his hand out. “When I was a teenager, I used to take things somebody cooked up in their bathroom. No reason to get cautious now,” he said.

She handed him the spoon, and he took one long look at it before raising it to his lips.

“It has a rather strong taste,” she warned him just as he was sliding it in.

“Gah—Jesus. Son of a—”

He made all the faces and exclamations she’d been through before. It was a little funny, she had to admit, when it was happening to someone else.

When he got control of himself again, he said, “You have got to make that smokable or something. God. It tastes like a fish’s ass.”

He handed her the spoon back.

“I need you to make notes,” she said. “Anything you feel, even if you’re not sure it’s related or relevant, write it all down.”

“Weren’t you listening earlier?” he asked. “I can hardly make little musical notes on a page, and those are just dots and lines.”

“You’ll have to find a way,” she said, holding him to the same standard she held herself.

She took a breath. It sounded wet and ragged filling up her chest, and she didn’t expect that. Testing it on herself was one thing. Giving it to someone else—

“No one else knows about this,” Rachel said.

Harry got his cane maneuvered around under his left hand where he liked it. At least he had hurt his right leg. The right leg was bad anyway.

“I know,” he said, pushing his weight away from the wall but keeping his right hand out, as ineffectual as it was, to help with his balance. He started his many-point turn toward the master bedroom for that nap he’d fought so hard for. “First rule of fight club: Don’t talk about fight club.”

Rachel didn’t know what a fight club was, but it sounded right. She nodded, but Harry wasn’t paying her any attention. He didn’t have any to spare. She watched until he made it to his bedroom door. Back in her own room, she scooped up the second half of the solids batch from the centrifuge. She took that herself and waited for it to kick in.

*   *   *

There was a bigger, newer Groceries “R” Us kind of place with full-size carts and eighteen kinds of orange juice on the other side of the island, but its presence irritated Tilda. Her market or, as she thought of it, “the” market, the real one, was downtown just a block from the bookstore. The sign said
OLLOO’ET DRY GOODS AND GROCERY
. It wasn’t big enough to have or need wheeled carts. The shelves were made of real wood, and the whole store smelled a little like ripe cheese and patchouli, which might have also been the teenage clerks smoking weed in the back. There were two kinds of orange juice—pulp or no pulp—and that was fine with Tilda.

She wasn’t in any particular hurry. In fact, she was trying very hard not to hurry and have to go back to the house too soon. She had known that coming back to take care of Harry would be a mistake. At least part of her had known it. Part of her remembered how he was—how insular and difficult and single-minded and so willing to do what he wanted when he wanted no matter what might follow later. Their friends had dismissed this as his “artistic temperament” during their marriage. Tilda had met plenty of artists. She was pretty sure Harry was just an ass.

The other part of her, the part that had agreed to come, felt that Harry was unfinished business or maybe just business finished poorly. It wasn’t that she had stopped loving him as much as it had turned to something else. After Becca died, things had not been the same. Harry had blamed himself, and Tilda had blamed him, too. It had been an accident. No one thought that it hadn’t been, but just because something is an accident, doesn’t mean there isn’t fault. And forgiveness, it turned out, was something that had to be given all over again, every single day. And it had to be accepted on that same schedule. There were probably people who could do it. People who were better than they were, but it had been easier to move away from each other, to stop bumping into each other’s hurt parts quite so much.

But now Harry was dying. He needed her. He needed her to be close, and those hurt parts were still there, getting bumped all over again. And now she was in the grocery and dry goods store wandering up and down each of the aisles, so she didn’t have to go back too soon.

She was in the personal care section even though she couldn’t think of a single thing she needed there. It seemed the store did a booming business in overpriced boutique soaps and candles that she was sure were popular with tourists but were far too foo-foo for her to buy. She looked at them anyway and recognized little round lavender soaps that were in bathrooms on the second and third floors of Harry’s house. Tilda wondered if the housekeeper bought them or if they were left over from Maggie.

Tilda was smelling some lemon verbena soaps—square and not wrapped in the floral paper like the lavender—which made them possibilities in Tilda’s mind, when her cell phone rang.

“I think I’m supposed to wait a certain amount of time before calling,” Tip said on the other end. “But I couldn’t remember how long that was.”

“Is that how you usually say ‘hello’?” Tilda asked, trying not to sound too much like she was smiling.

“Not when I’m calling my dentist if that’s what you’re asking,” he said. “Where are you, and what are you doing?”

“I’m thinking about buying soap, but only if it isn’t wrapped in floral paper. And I’m at the little grocery downtown.”

“Can you wait there for fifteen minutes?” he asked.

“Probably. Why?”

“Trust me,” he said and hung up.

Tilda had the lemon verbena soap in one of the square wicker baskets the store provided for shopping. She’d also picked up some tomatoes on the vine, even if they were horribly out of season, and a pound of peppered bacon. She was trying to decide if she would walk down to the coffee-shop-slash-bakery for bread or if she would just buy it here. Part of that decision depended on what Tip had in mind, and she had no idea what he had in mind, and the uncertainty over whether or not to buy the bread was starting to get just a little annoying when she heard his voice over her shoulder.

“What’s a pretty lady like you doing in a dry goods shop like this?”

She turned around. He was wearing a brown suede jacket with off-white shearling around the collar, and he was holding a bouquet of flowers. They were white, and there were different kinds, none of which she could have said the names of with any certainty. They were arranged with bits of fern and greenery and a couple of sprigs of pussy willow, too. They looked natural and wild but still beautiful, which meant that someone with a lot of talent spent time making them look that way. He handed them to her.

She loved them, and she loved even more that he had surprised her with them, and she was afraid if she showed that a little too much that something vulnerable and bad would happen, so she took them and said, “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“Pay for that stuff,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

She did, and when they walked out the door together, she carrying the flowers and he carrying her groceries, she asked, “Are we driving or walking?”

“Walking,” he said. “It’s just around the corner.”

They walked east, the opposite direction of the bakery and the bookstore and the restaurant he ran. This way was toward the end of the commercial strip, and if they went too much farther, they’d be on streets lined with old houses, most of them Victorian or something kind of like it, which had been turned into bed and breakfasts or dental offices. Just beyond those were the real houses—nice but less showy and historic—where real people lived. They turned left, away from the water, and went half a block.

They passed a children’s clothing store called Two Birds. It had an old-fashioned Christmas scene done up in the window, but instead of ornaments, the tree was decorated with little socks. They passed a florist that didn’t bother with a window display but just let you see right in to the buckets of flowers and potted plants, including red and pink and white poinsettias. Tilda wondered if that was where he picked up her flowers. And then they stopped.