The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (58 page)

At ten he gets a call from Ellie at the Health Center, offering to keep Sara for the duration of the storm. She tells him what he already knows; regular services here are probably going to be interrupted, Graymont has an auxiliary generator but they may still lose power. If the water broaches the top of the seawall, they’ll have to evacuate. Ellie says gently, “She’ll do better here.”

“We can handle it.”

“Sometimes these old people get disoriented.” The nurse uses a word he resents but is no longer surprised to hear. “She’s pretty frail.”

When they were in their sixties they vowed never to get like that. No. Like this. Sara’s sitting in her chair looking frail, if that’s what they want to call it, but just as pretty as she ever did in the new dress. He’s like the prince contemplating Sleeping Beauty:
If only you could speak
. He tells Ellie, “Thanks, but we can handle it.” Clinging to royal palms at right angles like Terangi and his love, if they have to—athletic feats in which he and Sara wave like banners, brilliant in the wind.

Athletic feats are not out of the question. Once Sara flew, but only for a moment. Drunk on spring, they left the supper dishes and went tumbling into the fresh grass behind their postwar house. The little girls hung close, but Willy hitched across the grass and lunged behind a bush where only a protruding
scrap of nightgown located him, like the tail of Casper the Friendly Ghost. Bill’s oldest girl pushed her father down on his back in the grass. “Make me a flying angel.” She leaned forward to take his hands. He planted his feet firmly in her midsection, raising her until she was horizontal, floating above the earth. At first she wavered and gasped, but eventually she let go and lifted her head and her arms as if in a swan dive, soaring, with Bill’s supporting feet her only contact with earth. “Me,” somebody cried and Bill let her down gently and held out his hands to the next angel, thinking it would be his younger girl. “Oh, please. Me.”

And this was how, that evening in Newton, Mass., with his children jiggling and crowding and her sweet breath damp on his face and her face framed by the heartbreaking violet light, he held his wife Sara in midair, suspended for the moment before his legs buckled under her weight and with a little shriek of rage, she pitched off. Before she landed she lashed out at him, “Fool!”—kids, Sara, everybody in a tumble, with the little girls murmuring “Oh mommy,” while his wife picked Willy up and clamped him to her like a shield.

Over the baby’s head she shot Bill a look that suggested this was no better than she expected, that she might love him forever, but this failure she could never forgive.

It makes him sad to see his grown children getting old; touch your face and think:
am I
. The house he bought to raise their family was the house he sold for the down payment here; in other circumstances he would have willed it to their kids. If the superintendent at Graymont said, “Sometimes people show remarkable improvement after they move here,” it was a factor.

Things you have to believe so you can do what you have to do.

When she wakes in the night he goes to the pocket fridge just the way he always does at this hour. He gets her a vanilla Jell-O pudding, prodding her lips with the spoon until she flinches at the pressure of the cold metal and begins to eat. She’d rather sleep; so would he, but this is important. She eats so little during the day that it’s important to give her these little meals whenever he can get her to eat. Sleepy, he says automatically, “You’ve got to get your strength back,” where he used to say, “You have to keep up your strength.” Frail.
She looks all right to me.

After they had their Schnauzer put down, he dreamed he and the dog were at the top of a stone tower and the dog was flying, dipping and wheeling around his head. He woke reluctantly. Sara was shaking his arm, and breathless from being dragged out of sleep he gasped, “What’s the matter?”

“How am I supposed to know what’s the matter? You were laughing,” she said.

To his shame he dreamed last month that Sara was lying in her bed and at the benevolent distance dreams sometimes grant the dreamer, he also saw that she was severely altered by whatever change is marching over her in jackboots, pushed so far that she might never make it back. Then he saw his wife leave her body, Sara transfigured. No. Sara restored, dark-haired again, with that sweet, quick mouth; real Sara, that he knows. She separated herself and lifted, departing—it was so perfect. He was so glad. Then just before she disappeared from the upper right-hand corner of the room he saw her turn back and blow a kiss at the figure on the bed. It made him feel happy, terrible.

Sometimes it’s simpler to go on being a fool. Pretend everything’s
OK
until they rub your nose in it. Evacuate. You have a hard enough time taking care of her in a place she knows, and the last thing you want is to pry her out of Graymont like a snail out of a shell and set her down someplace new. Pretend you can stick it out here. When he wakes to a power failure he sees no need to panic Sara and no need to keep calling the desk, but he is prepared. He puts Sara’s night things and all her medications in a bag, and as a precaution adds food: cheese, fruit and the chocolate granola bars his kids had sent, imagining they can get their mother to eat. He fixes her cold cereal for breakfast and peanut butter sandwiches for lunch.

When the aide doesn’t come he reconciles himself to the fact that services are interrupted, but he can’t help anticipating dinnertime, when he and Sara can join their assigned tablemates at that wretched assigned table for hot food and he can compare notes on the storm. Sara’s restless; usually they take a walk now. Pretend. They paddle in the halls, Sara stumbling even on industrial strength carpeting. By midafternoon even though the winds have died, water is crashing over the breakwater, creeping closer to the Garson building where they live.

From the window he sees handicapped vans and ambulances removing patients from the health center, and as he watches, neighbors with overnight bags start coming out of the main door below. There’s a procession of cars snaking out of the parking lot in water almost up to the axles—old models, mostly, but most of them top of the line. Motors flood out and won’t start again. Watching, Bill decides that if the time comes he and Sara will be better off leaving by bus. When the faucet belches muddy salt water, he knows it’s time. Even before the desk calls to alert them, they are standing out front with the others in the continuing rain. He’s surrounded by poor old people in straw hats and plastic rain
hats, hunched and miserable; as the bus pulls up and they bump each other in the rush to hoist themselves on he thinks she may not talk, but Sara’s no worse than the rest.

There’s more storm damage than he thought. Power is out all over town and flooded streets are clogged with shorn branches and felled trees. The bus driver says they’re only going a short way; Bill was a fool to imagine they’d be taken to some nice safe motel where he could just check in and try to make Sara think nothing’s changed. Instead they are delivered to a downtown church where the patients from the health center are already being rolled into little clusters in their wheelchairs or bedded down on pews. These old people look terrible. Until you see them together like this, until you see them yanked out of context and jammed in here in the aggregate, milling in escalating confusion, you don’t know how bad it is. Here are his erstwhile neighbors, here are the lame, the halt, and tottering next to him, some old wreck—
mon semblable
—no, he has to stop himself. He has to distinguish Us from Them. He has to ignore the change disruption wreaks in people who looked
OK
to him in the cushioned safety of the Graymont dining room; in this context it is essential to make the separation. My God, these people look like all those wounded soldiers laid out in Atlanta just before the intermission, you know, in
Gone With the Wind.

Every old person in the place seems to need something—the drenched, the hungry, the bed and wheelchair patients who need their medications, bedpan, fresh Attends. There isn’t enough staff to go around. Bill can see the superintendent helping an old man toward the sacristy; there’s only one bathroom on this floor. In spite of the staff’s best efforts the nave is filling up with complaints; voices roll in on top of voices—hungry, anxious, querulous, disturbed. He thinks he hears Sara beginning to whimper; wouldn’t you? And just as she tugs at his elbow another batch comes in. In ordinary times Bill would whirl and stare into her face, trying to catch the ghost of an expression. She’s been so free of emotion for so long that he needs to see Sara altered by circumstance, even Sara distressed, but here’s Ellie from the health center, saying in confidential tones, “This is awful. I don’t know what we’re going to do with them.”

It’s like Parris Island. “We’ve got to get organized.”

The nurse is so pressed by circumstance that she simply accepts the
we
. “I could use a little help.”

“Wait.” Now he does turn to Sara, who smiles that smile. No. It’s the smile she gave him that night in Beaufort, brave:
this isn’t so bad
. Yes, he tells himself. She’s all right. “Now you stay here.” He kisses her on the forehead and sits her down in a pew next to a nice old lady who’s perched like a confused pigeon, clinging to her purse. “This is my wife, Sara Penney. We’re neighbors.” As she
gives him a wary scowl he says, “She won’t be any trouble. Look, she’s smiling at you.”

Then he looks for Ellie. She’s at the door, where newcomers are pooling like tadpoles in a storm drain. “Give me your clipboard. At least I can check these people in.”

Through the night Bill works, helping these old folks slog in from the bus and try to dry themselves, rounding them up when they start to wander, serving coffee, carrying trays, and if a part of him knows that Sara has drifted out of the pew where he left her, he tells himself Ellie has an eye on her and besides, he’s needed here. He has work to do.

He’s of more use here than he was at Parris Island. He acknowledges now that was only busy work. At Parris Island he needed to think he was doing something for the dead boys when he knew there was nothing anybody could do for them. Here he hands out food and people thank him; he brings medicine to the ones who need it on a regular schedule and they take it; he boils water on the gas stove in the basement and brings it up for the nurses to pour in the paper cups he takes around with the meds. He has the pleasure of doing something that gets results.

In a way it was a relief to him when Willy caught up with the dead recruits in age and passed into the safety of his late twenties. If in fact you do some things because of certain other things, you can’t afford to make too much of it, or think of the events as tightly linked. Not Willy’s fault that as he grew Bill had to suppress images of his son marching with the dead boys. He was just grateful that Willy wanted to be a doctor and had no interest in the service. Thank God he was exempt from the draft.

And just when he is busiest, clicking on all … Just when he is at his most effective, Bill discovers that Sara has wandered off. She isn’t anywhere. At first he thinks she’s gotten lost in the choir loft or one of the basement bathrooms, but when he’s looked in all those places he has to admit to himself that she is gone. Distraught, he goes from one attendant to another: “Have you seen her?” “Have you?” Vivian Leigh in Atlanta, looking for … oh stop. Nobody has. He can’t ask them to stop what they’re doing just to look for one old lady who may have wandered off. Even Ellie, who has designs on her, is too caught up in the exigencies. He can’t even ask one of the old people to go out in the rain and help him look. Bill is exhausted by this time, surprised by the fact that his efforts have left him so shaky, but he can’t sit down. Sara’s gone. It’s raining again, but not enough to keep him from going out, and, terrified that he’ll
lose her—no, that he won’t lose her—galvanized by a spasm of guilty love, he rushes out of the church and goes looking for his wife.

Terangi, watch out. He blunders along the rain torn streets and although in the dark like this everything is confusing, finds that he’s wading along the main road back to Graymont. From Graymont, town seems so far, but it’s such a short walk! Struggling against the water that covers the toes of his shoes, he rounds the last corner without any sense of how long it’s taken him to make it this far. Leaning against the carved Graymont sign with a strangely fated feeling, he can’t know whether it’s because he’s so impoverished, so bereft of imagination that this is the only place he can think of to look for her, or whether he’s trying to second-guess Sara, who is beyond guessing, because he hopes blind instinct has led her back to the one place she may know.

Just maybe the waters are receding; debris and dead palm fronds clog the walks in a pattern left by high tide. He can’t see much; it’s raining hard. If he calls her, will she know her name? If she hears him, will she come? He’s too drained and guilty to call very loud. Terangi vowed love forever, but what can you do? What can you do?

Then he sees her under the canopy in front of the main building, standing with the security guard who just found her and the charge nurse who left her post in the health center at the guard’s call. Recognizing Bill as he emerges from the rain, the guard, who locks the Garson building at night and unlocks it in the morning, touches his wet cap and turns away as if what happens next is going to be so private that he is embarrassed. The nurse stands with her arms around Sara as if trying to dry her out and get her warm at the same time. Bill doesn’t have to hear her say,
How could you?
Too pressed to speak, he holds out his hands. With a scowl the nurse releases his wife and delivers her to him, sodden and desperate, frail Sara, his nemesis, his love—Sara, who turns to him with her lovely face leached to the skull and beautiful, drenched eyes that hold not an intimation, not even a ghost of recognition. The nurse is angry, Sara terrified and trembling; she does not have to say:
She can’t go on like this.