The Infinite Tides (5 page)

That night he stood and looked out the upstairs window at the bight of dark concrete that was the cul-de-sac. At one point a figure passed the house, some nightwalker, its shadow cast out behind like an arrow pointing ever away. Keith watched the figure’s slow progress as it bisected that circular space, passing under the streetlights until the line it made with its motion disappeared beyond the angle of his view through the window. The street so still that it seemed a photograph or a museum diorama. He waited there at the window, watching in the encompassing silence, but the figure, whoever it might have been,
did not return to his view. He might have been disappointed but if so he did not acknowledge it. Instead, he recognized only self-reliance, a position and idea he had always held, even as he turned away from the window and stared down at the faint speckles of eggshell that flecked over his hands.

“Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you.”

“Oh, I can see you.”

“I can see you too.” A pause. Then: “How … how are you?”

“I’m OK,” she said. Tears were already streaming down her face.

He stared at her. The compartment was so quiet. So terribly quiet. “It’ll be OK, Barb. We’ll be OK.”

And then the phone was ringing and he burst out spastically, still half asleep, and answered it without even really understanding what he was doing, the laptop glowing in his mind, his body falling back into gravity all at once as he sputtered into the receiver: “Wh-what? Hello?”

“Keith, it’s Dr. Hoffmann.”

“Oh,” he said. “Dr. Hoffmann.” He was half sitting, the blankets and sheets splayed around him.

“Everything OK?” Hoffmann said. “You don’t sound well. Did I wake you?”

“No, no. I’m … I’m OK. I was … I was asleep.” He lay back down, slowly, carefully.

“You want me to call back?”

“No, no, I’m fine. I’m awake.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. I’m awake. It’s fine.” The clock on the floor by the bed glowed faintly in the morning light: 8:17.

“OK, then.” A pause. “Well, I’m calling because you missed your appointment.”

He tilted his head back to the pillow and closed his eyes. The image of Barb’s face remained: a blurred shape on a laptop screen. The gauze of his memory. A haze of ghosts. Even you, Keith Corcoran. Even you. “I have to apologize for that, I guess,” he said at last. “I’m not at JSC right now.”

“Well, I know that but I had to make a couple of calls to find out. It would have been nice to get a call from you about this.”

“It was kind of sudden,” he said, his eyes opening slowly to the flat white emptiness of the room.

“You know, when people miss appointments often there’s an underlying reason.”

Keith paused before answering. “Yeah, that might be but this time I just forgot,” he said. “I’m taking a vacation.”

“Where to?”

“Well, right now I’m home.”

“Oh. How long have you been there?”

“Two days. I’ve been painting.”

“Painting?”

“The place needs a paint job.”

“You’ve got work to do.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t mean the painting. I’m sure it’s hard being there.”

“Oh, I guess so,” Keith said.

“You want to talk some? I could do a phone appointment tomorrow.”

The ceiling was a blank white void above him. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe give me a few more days to settle in here.”

“We’ve made some good progress over the last few weeks. I’d like to keep that momentum going.”

“I would too. I’m busy here with the painting, though. And I’m really doing OK.”

Hoffman was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I’d like you to
think about why you forgot to tell me you were leaving JSC. We can focus on that for our next appointment, but give it some thought in the meantime. Think of it as your homework assignment.”

“All right,” Keith said, without conviction.

“Call me in a week and let me know how it’s going and we’ll set an appointment then,” Hoffmann said.

“That sounds good.”

“Everything OK with the prescriptions?”

“As far as I can tell.”

“Let me know if you need anything adjusted.”

“I’ll do that,” Keith said.

Even after he ended the call, the memory that roiled out of the half sleep in which he had been drifting remained with him as a kind of aftereffect, as if a flashbulb had burst and the shape of its burning still lingered against the black emptiness of his cornea. At least missing the appointment with Dr. Hoffmann meant that he would not have to discuss such topics today, a fact that offered some sense of relief, although in truth he had done little actual talking during the dozen or so meetings they had had in Houston upon his return from the mission.
Do you feel sad?
Yes.
What do you want to do about that?
I can think of no way to answer that.
Do you think the migraines are related to how you feel?
I don’t know.
Did you want to talk about anything else?
Not really. Are we done? He could not imagine the purpose of this line of questioning and so could not imagine any words that could provide an answer. The most fundamental information had been lost: trajectory, velocity, acceleration, indeed the pull of gravity itself. All he knew now was that he was unaware where such variables could be located and so he could find no possible solution, not to any of it. But he did not think this answer was what Dr. Hoffmann was looking for.

By midafternoon he had completed the first coat of paint on the largest wall in the kitchen and had begun carefully cutting under the
cabinets with a brush. When the doorbell rang his immediate thought was that he would open the door to find a delivery person with the files he had asked Jim Mullins to send from his office at JSC and with this thought in mind he jogged to the entryway, the paintbrush in his hand, and pulled open the door.

The woman who stood there did not appear to be delivering anything. “Hello, Mr. Corcoran,” she said. “I’m Sally Erler.”

“OK,” he said, blinking in the bright sunlight of the open doorway. He glanced around quickly for the box but there was nothing near the doorway and the only item she was carrying was a briefcase.

“I’m your realtor,” she said.

“What?”

She wore a navy blue suit and smiled, extending her hand, which he took as reflex. “Your wife called me and said you’d be home,” she said. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d just drop by. Is that all right? You look busy.”

“Busy?” he said.

“Painting?”

“Oh.” He looked at the brush in his hand. “Yes, I’m painting. The kitchen.”

“Is this not a good time?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“If this is a bad time we can make an appointment,” she said. The smile remained on her face like a permanent mask.

“No, it’s fine,” he said once more. He stood there in the doorway, looking at her.

“Would you mind if I came in?”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.” He stepped back and waved her in and when she entered he closed the door behind her.

“Nice, nice home,” she said.

“Barb called you?”

“She said you were interested in selling. It’s a buyer’s market, but you know we can always make things happen.”

“I’m sure.” He did not know what else to say and as he stood there a dull sense of irritation flooded through him and then disappeared. Did Barb think he was somehow unable to call a realtor on his own? What kind of incompetent person did she think he was? “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “A cup of coffee?”

“No, I’m fine,” she said. “Can I take a look around?”

“Sure. Is that what you need to do?”

“I have to know what I’m selling, Mr. Corcoran,” she said. She showed her teeth again.

He stepped out of her way. “OK,” he said.

She opened the black binder in her hands and took notes. Keith wandered behind her into the living room. “You weren’t kidding when you said you were painting,” she said.

“Yeah, I just started.”

“When do you think you’ll be done?”

“I’m not sure yet. Four or five days?”

“OK,” she said. She wrote something in her notebook. “New appliances.”

“I guess so.”

She nodded. Then she motioned toward the massive sofa next to them in the living room. “Not quite done moving?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “It might be easier to sell if all your personal belongings were removed from the home. Maybe you could move the remaining items to the garage for now?”

He looked at her. “OK,” he said.

Again, the smile. “Mind if I go upstairs?”

“No, but I haven’t painted up there yet.”

She wandered away and he did not follow. Instead, he set the paintbrush in the tray in the kitchen and retrieved his phone from atop the plastic-covered island and dialed and when Barb answered he said, “You called a realtor?”

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. Is that OK?”

“Is that OK?” he repeated. “I’m a little confused here.”

“Confused how?”

“I thought I was doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Calling a realtor.”

“I was just trying to help,” she said. “Is that OK?”

“No, not really.”

“I’m sorry.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “It’s fine. I just … I’m painting in here so it’s not really ready for a realtor yet.”

“You’re painting?”

“I’m repainting it. It needs paint.”

“You should just hire someone and leave.”

“Leave for where?”

“I don’t want you to be there.”

“What? Why not?”

There was silence on the phone for a long moment and then she said, “Never mind.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s OK,” she said. “I was just trying to help. Is that a crime?”

He was still confused by the conversation but he did not return to that confusion now. “I don’t need your help with this,” he said.

“OK,” she said again. Then: “It doesn’t need to be painted to be listed.”

“I know that.”

There was a silence on the line. Then she said, “How are you doing?”

“How am I doing?”

“Yeah.”

“Fine,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, Barb. Everything’s fine.”

“OK,” she said.

“I’ve got to go deal with the real estate lady.”

“OK,” she said again.

He said good-bye and clicked the phone closed. There was no emotion, not even irritation, just a flat white emptiness.

The realtor’s voice was coming from somewhere in the house: “Mr. Corcoran?”

He had been standing at the sliding glass door in his socks, looking out at the backyard, a stripe of green lawn that baked slowly in the increasing morning heat, and he turned from that now and stepped toward the sound of her voice as she appeared in the doorway. “In here,” he said.

“I have a few things to go over with you,” she said. “It won’t take very long.”

“OK,” he said. He stood there, blinking, waiting for the few things to materialize.

“Or we can do it another time,” she said.

“Let’s go ahead and do it now,” he said.

They moved to the kitchen island and she spread some paperwork before him on the plastic sheeting that encased it and he read, initialed, and signed in the requisite boxes. “And here too,” the realtor said. Then: “Is that your daughter?”

“What?” he said. He followed her eyes to the sliding glass door to the backyard. A little girl stood there who looked so much like Quinn at that age that he was actually startled by the sight and he made the same vowel-heavy sound he had made when seeing the bird. She might have been nine or ten years old, her face enshadowed by the cupped shape of her hands as she leaned forward against the glass, apparently peering in at them although the shade rendered her eyes invisible. She was in that pose for only a moment and then, at the sound of Keith’s surprise, she bolted, a brief skinny ghost comprised of sharp knees and elbows, disappearing from view.

He turned back to the realtor, his heart thumping in his chest. She stared at him. “I don’t know who that is,” he said. “Not mine.”

She smiled. “Neighborhood kids,” she said. “That can be a good
selling point to a family looking to buy a home.” She packed the papers back into her binder. “Probably kicked a ball over the fence,” she added.

He may have answered but there was a sense that something was moving in his chest again, a thin sharp fluttering, and he was relieved when the realtor told him she was done and they both returned to the front door. There was some discussion of price and various details and he stood in the doorway as she finished talking and flashing her toothy smile. Then they shook hands and a moment later she was gone.

There was no sign of the little girl through the sliding glass door, no ball or toy or footprint left behind to signal her presence in the yard, but when he stepped back he could see the marks of her hands where they had cupped her face against the glass and Quinn’s face ghosting up between those smudged prints, her age dialed back to the age of the girl he had seen, the age she had been when they still were, for those faint short years, a father and a mother and a daughter in a golden idyll, before the whole thing had, without sound and without violence, spun slowly and imperceptibly into a distance that now gaped open before him. There was so little tangible about the experience, the calculus of loss no equation at all but rather some impossible blur, a field of turbulence so complex as to be blank, like an infinite and ever-moving cloud that could be defined only by a set of equations capable of mapping each individual droplet of suspended fluid, each molecule of vapor.

He stood at the glass door and stared at the smudge of the girl’s handprints. Beyond those: a strip of green grass, a small cinderblock wall with some weakly yellowing shrubs, the concrete pad where he rinsed the dropcloths each evening and laid them out to dry, the wooden fence dividing this tableau from nearly indistinguishable ones on all four sides. Past the fence, he could see the edge of the sky over the roofs of adjacent houses. The bird he had seen on the morning after his return had already begun to feel like the memory of a dream, the eagle or hawk or whatever it had been, bleaching into the impossibly
new subdivision that surrounded him, the patterned rooflines of nearly identical houses one after another. He could muster no clear sense of grief from such a sight. Perhaps there was a universe not so far from this one where distant birds of prey circled darkly in endless thermal updrafts above perfectly designed and orderly suburban landscapes. It was a pleasant thought but as he turned toward the kitchen island and the paintbrush that lay on its plastic-wrapped surface he knew that the most pressing universe he could think of was the one in which the file box arrived at his doorstep. All others endless and bleak and futile.