The Wilds (6 page)

Elise can smell the stuffiness of Eden Village Nursing Home only when she returns from being outside for a while. It’s as if they’ve shellacked the floors with urine and Lysol. And in the cafeteria, some gravy is always boiling, spiked with the sweat and waste and blood of the dying, all the juices that leak from withering people—huge cauldrons of gravy that emit a meaty, medicinal steam.

Now that Elise can walk, now that she’s thinking a little faster, she feels up to exploring. She wants to find
the room where Pip Stukes lives, ask him point-blank if he’s the man she married.

Someone’s approaching down the endless hallway, a speck swelling bigger and bigger until it transforms into a nurse, a boy with a golden dab of beard.

“Looking for the Dogwood Library?” he says. “Elvis and the Chipmunks?” He points toward a small corridor, then shuffles off into nonexistence.

Peering down the passageway, Elise sees a parlor: wingback chairs, sofas, a crowd of patients in wheelchairs. She wills her strap-on
LIMB
s to move and, after a heartbeat pause, lurches down the hall. Over by a makeshift stage, the wheelchair-bound patients watch some middle-aged men set up equipment. A few people with
LIMB
s weave among the furnishings. Elise recognizes a tall woman with bald spots and a stubby old man with big ears. She creeps behind a potted palm to watch Elvis and the Chipmunks take the stage. Three large plush rodents sporting high pompadours, they jump into a brisk, twittering version of “Jailhouse Rock.” Elise is about to leave in disgust when she spots a man slumped in a wheelchair, dozing, his face so familiar that the shock of it interrupts the signals pulsing from her brain to her legs and into the sensors of her Power Units. She collapses onto a brocade couch. Sits there wheezing in the blotchy light. Then she calms herself
and looks the man over. She remembers the hawk nose, the big, creased forehead.

The Chipmunks croon “Love Me Tender” in their earsplitting rodent way, and Elise snorts. The man in the wheelchair had a great voice, could play guitar by ear. All those summer evenings they spent on the porch have been streamlined into archetypes and filed away in different sections of her cerebral cortex. And now the memories come trickling out. She remembers the sound of the porch fan and the smell of the lake and the feel of his hand on the back of her neck. She recalls swimming under stars and singing folk songs and drinking wine until their heads floated off their necks.

Elise steps around a coffee table heaped with
Reader’s Digest
s. She studies the pink bulges of the man’s closed eyes, the blanket draped over his legs, the big, fleshy head, humming with mysterious thoughts. The mouth is what strikes her hardest, the lips full, just a quirk feminine. When he opens his eyes and she sees the strange green, she knows it’s him, the man who once kissed her in a birch canoe, moonlight twitching on the water.

“Who are you?” she says, the words pouring miraculously from her tongue.

He studies her, and she fears he’s been drained dry, all of his memories siphoned by therapists into that electric box, where they bump around like trapped moths.

He makes a gurgling sound, small and goatish. His left eye is blighted with red veins. His hands rest on his knees, and she wonders if he can move them at all.

“Are you my husband?” she says.

The man’s tongue pokes out and then retreats back into the cave of his mouth. He grunts. His left hand closes into a fist.

“I thought you were dead,” she says.

“Bwa,” he says, but then a nurse seizes his wheelchair, jerks him around, and trundles him off toward the corridor. Elise staggers in a panic and her
LIMB
s malfunction, leaving her crumpled on the carpet as the Chipmunks mock her with “Heartbreak Hotel.”

She pulls herself up, squats, then stands, wills her legs to move fast, and they do, speeding her along like a power walker, but then a
CNA
with dyed black hair stops her. Scans her tag, beeps the Dementia Ward, and shuffles her back to the place she’s supposed to be.

Hands folded in her lap, Elise slumps in the
MEG
scanner. Groggy from an antipsychotic called Vivaquel, she’s having a hard time concentrating on what the therapists are saying.

“Barbecue bubba,” says the boy. “Magnolia, moonshine, ma and pa.”

“Very original,” says the girl. “How about some limbic work? Aural olfactory?”

“Whatever,” says the boy.

“Doo-wop and gardenias.” The girl giggles. “Who the hell makes this shit up?”

Elise wishes they’d quit flirting and get on with it. She has half a mind to tell the boy that he’d be attractive with a decent haircut, but she doesn’t. She sits with her arms crossed until the boy slips in her ear buds and clamps a plastic cup over her nose. In minutes Elise smells sickly sweet aerosol air freshener. She coughs, and they lower her olfactory levels. As the Everly Brothers croon “All I Have to Do Is Dream” in their wistful Appalachian twang, she can’t help but sway to the music, breathing in a whiff of synthetic cherry, the exact scent of a Lysol spray that was marketed in the 1980s.

“She doesn’t like it,” says the boy.

“She’s responding,” says the girl. “Look at her amygdala. It’s glowing.”

Elise recalls a cramped hospital room that smelled of cherry Lysol, the green-eyed man hunched in a bed, looking at the wall. He dove into the lake one summer night and bashed his head against a rock. Now his legs wouldn’t work right and he refused to look her in the eye. She held his balled fist in both hands and squeezed. The doctor said his motor neurons were damaged,
compromising his leg muscles. The doctor went on and on about
partial recovery
and
physical therapy
, but the man didn’t seem to be listening.

Elise remembers the smell of the man and the way he cleared his throat when he got nervous. She remembers how his silence filled the room every time he heard a motorboat fly by on the water. Stiffly, they’d wait for the sound to fade, and then pretend they hadn’t heard it.

She wakes up with his name on her tongue: Robert Graham Mood, otherwise known as Bob. In the depths of her Vivaquel nap, she saw him, swimming in the lake’s brown murk, down near the silty bottom. Enormous primordial catfish flickered through the hydrilla, and Bob fed them night crawlers with his hands. Right where his sick legs used to be, Bob was growing flippers, two stunted incipient fins sprouting from his knees.

This merman
was
her husband, Elise realized, and he was swimming away from her, toward the deepest part of the lake, where the Morrisons’ pontoon had sunk during a severe thunderstorm. The whole family had drowned: mother, father, three sons. And scuba divers swore they’d seen ghosts slithering near the wreck, glowing like electric eels.

Elise rolls onto her side. Her room has a window, but an air-conditioning unit blocks the view. And now a tech nurse is here to attach her
LIMB
s to her scrawny legs. As he hooks up her sensors, he doesn’t say one word, doesn’t make eye contact: he might as well be tinkering with an old lawn mower.

Out in the pear orchard, Pip Stukes comes strutting, does a little turn around a park bench, and stoops to pluck a fistful of chrysanthemums, which he presents with a debonair smirk.

“Thank you,” says Elise, shocked when the words pop out of her mouth.

“So you
can
talk!” says Pip. “I knew it. I could tell by the look in your eyes. I knew Elise Boykin was in there somewhere.”

Elise Mood
she wants to say, but keeps her lips zipped. Elise Boykin married Bob Mood, but Pip Stukes refused to honor her changed name.

“Have you seen the goldfish pond?” Pip extends his arm, and she takes it in spite of herself. Curls her fingers around his bicep and gives it a squeeze, surprised by the wobble of muscle encased in the sagging skin. They amble over to the pond, which is tucked behind a stand of canna lilies.

“Watch this,” says Pip. He pulls a plastic bag from his pocket, shakes bread crumbs into his hand, and flings them into the water.

Elise concentrates on the oblong circle of liquid, eyeing it like an old queen gazing into a magic mirror. She sees a glimmer of orange, and then another, and another: six fish flitting up from the black depths. Lovely, greedy, they pucker their lips to suck up bits of bread.

Pip laughs and slips his arm around her, a gesture so familiar that she mechanically follows suit, twining her arm around his waist. She ought to pull away, but she doesn’t.

She studies his profile and sees him as a younger man, after his grandfather died and left him the money, after the Feed and Seed shut down and he took up jogging. He’d run by her house at dawn, handsomeness emerging from his body in the form of cheekbones and muscle tone. Meanwhile, Bob slumped, staring at the TV—a man who used to hate the tube. Called it “the idiot box,” “the shit pump,” “opiate of the masses.” But now he said nothing, just eyeballed the screen, silence filling the house like swamp gas.

She took up smoking again, would slip down to the dock and sit with her feet in the water. She’s the one who checked the catfish traps. She’s the one who picked the vegetables that summer and trucked them to the market. She still sold her chowchow and blueberry jam and eggs
from the chickens whose house needed a new roof. She sold azalea seedlings to the Yankees who were buying up every last waterfront lot on the lake. After Bob’s accident, they’d sold fifty acres of their land, the woods shrinking around them, big houses popping up in every bay.

One day in July she took a break to go swimming. Just before Bob’s accident, she’d bought a French-cut one-piece that now seemed shameless—too young for forty-three—but she was alone in the cove. She dove into the water and swam out to the floating dock. Let the sun dry her hair, which had darkened to auburn over the years. And then Pip Stukes whisked by in his new motorboat, a dolphin-blue Savage Electra. He looked sharp in aviator sunglasses, slender and tan, a cigarette clenched in his teeth.