Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.

Wind Chimes

A light chill rain but she doesn’t want to come inside just yet.

Gusts of wind, a sound of wind chimes.

So happy!—at the faint, fading sound of the wind chimes hanging from several trees at the rear of the house.

Is it selfish, she wonders. To be so happy.

Something about the wind on this October afternoon, rich ripe autumnal smells, wet leaves, a grainy sky, wind chimes with a distinct silvery tone, that makes her almost faint with yearning as if she were (again, still) a young girl with her life before her.

All that you have, that has been given you. Why?

She has been (carefully) pouring seed into bird feeders, that hang from a wire above the deck. Corn, sunflower seeds. In nearby trees the birds are waiting—chickadees, titmice, sparrows.

It is such a small task. Yet it is crucial to her, to execute it correctly.

Realizing then that she has been hearing, from inside the house, a ringing phone.

Lightning-Struck

He’d been electrocuted—had he? Struck by lightning?

Not once. More than he could count.

All he can remember—torso, throat, face. Hands, forearms lifted to protect his face.

Bolts of electricity. Stunning, burning. Sizzling flesh he’d smelled—(had he?).

Mistake. His mistake.

Not a mistake: had no choice.

NOT A MISTAKE. BLUNDER, MAYBE.

What’s a blunder but a soft sort of mistake.

Words uttered without thinking. Actions recklessly undertaken like you’ve forgotten your age (what the hell’s his age?—not young). Clumsy footwork taking you somewhere you’d never intended to go, Jesus!—and now can’t turn back.

Whitey wants to argue. Plead his God damn case.

BUT SOMEHOW, WHITEY IS MUTE. Tongue too large for his mouth, gluey sensation in his throat. Can’t speak?

Lightning-bolt struck his throat. Burnt out his vocal cords.

He, John Earle McClaren—“Whitey”—all his life the very reverse of mute.

Could speak, for sure Whitey would protest. Could summon words, syllables, sounds articulated by (damp, not dry) tongue, (damp, not dry) interior of mouth, however the miracle of speech is executed, if he could remember how—Whitey would plead his case not to a jury but to the electorate, see how he does at the polls. Whitey McClaren would be vindicated!—he is sure.

It hurts! Heart hurts.

Some kind of shunt or clamp in the heart or (maybe) where the heart used to be, now there’s a pump.

Iridescent-silver wire threaded through—(what is it?)—(an artery?)—and through the artery and into his brain strangely shaped and textured like a walnut.

Smell of burning flesh, hair. Sizzle-smell.

Skull-bone. Skin-flap.

NOT WONDERING WHY IT’S SO NUMB in this place where he finds himself in a kind of tight-wrapped body-bandage, so dark, and why so silent, tremulous reverberating silence with a quick-pulse like falling water beneath—not wondering, yet.

Not wanting to think that once you’ve been struck by lightning you are finished.

Point he’s trying to make: a blunder should be fixable, not lethal, fatal.

God damn blunder not the last thing Whitey McClaren will ever do on this earth.

The Cruel Sister

“Oh. Oh no.”

Passing by an upstairs window of her house on Stone Ridge Drive and happening to glance out, and down.

Seeing—what was it?—a shiny-yellow-clad figure on a bicycle frantically pedaling up the long gravel driveway to the house. Shiny safety helmet and jutting elbows and knees like a large insect awkwardly riding a bicycle and the bicycle itself singularly ugly, rusted and mended with black tape.

Something so urgent about this creature, something so desperate, you did not want to know what urgency so propelled it, what desperation, you wanted only to shrink back against the wall to hide, not to hear footsteps on the front porch, a loud rapping at the door and a faint cry—Beverly? It’s me…

Could it be?—(quickly Beverly had stepped away from the window hoping not to be seen)—her brother Virgil?

Her younger brother, by five years. Her vagabond-brother, she thought him. Whom she had not seen in—how many months? A year? Virgil McClaren who had no cell phone, no computer, no car—with whom she had no way to communicate except through their parents, unless she wanted to write him a letter and put a stamp on it which no one ever did anymore.

Of course, it was Virgil. On the bicycle he’d boasted was too old, too ugly for anyone to steal. Who else!

That silly slick-yellow raincoat. Wouldn’t it be awkward, riding a bicycle while wearing an actual coat?

Had to be bad news. Why else would Virgil bicycle so frantically to see her?

Now he was knocking at the door below. Rude, loud. Not taking time to ring the doorbell as a polite visitor would. Bev’ly? H’lo—expecting her to drop everything she was doing, or might conceivably be doing, run downstairs to see what on earth he wanted.

Beverly’s heart beat rapidly in opposition. No I will not. God damn I will not run downstairs to you.

If Virgil had had any sense or good manners—(which, being Virgil, he did not)—he’d have found a phone to use, to call her. To call first. Oh why couldn’t Virgil behave like other people?

Beverly stood very still, listening in disbelief. Was Virgil trying the door? Actually turning the doorknob, to see if the door was locked?

Of course, the door was locked. All doors, windows. Locked.

However Virgil lived—(Beverly had an impression of a slovenly commune, persons like himself sharing a ramshackle old farm property that never had to be locked or secured since there was nothing worth stealing from it)—Beverly and her family lived very differently in Stone Ridge Acres where no property was smaller than two acres and all of the houses were four- or five-bedroom Colonials with landscaped lawns.

Not a gated community, it was not. Not a “segregated” community. Virgil was always saying it was, and that was why he wasn’t comfortable there amid myriad yellow signs and warnings—SLOW 15 MPH, PRIVATE ROAD, NO WAY OUT.

Virgil must have known that Beverly was home, he continued to call to her, and rattle the door.

(But—how could he be certain? To see Beverly’s SUV behind the garage he’d have had to bicycle back there. Or maybe he’d seen her at the upstairs window, peering down at him?)

It was too much like a child’s game. Hide-and-seek. One of their games, that had left them excited and sweaty.

If the door hadn’t been locked, Beverly wondered if Virgil would have dared to enter the house. Probably yes. He had no respect for boundaries. He had no private life, he often said, whether boastfully or simply truthfully, and didn’t think that others should have “private” lives, too.

Beverly recalled how, if Virgil hadn’t been able to find his big sister, he would cry for her plaintively—Bev’ly! Bev’ly!—until she couldn’t bear it any longer, the child’s fear and yearning, and stepped out of hiding to run to him.—Here I am, Silly-Billy! I was here all along.

How happy it had made her, to be so wanted. And to so easily placate the frightened child.

But not now. The hell with Virgil, now. Too late by too many years.

She didn’t want his bad news. She didn’t want his agitation, his emotion. Too late.

The more Beverly hardened her heart against Virgil, the more adamant she was he had wronged her.

And she was not going to bail Virgil out if he was in debt, or desperate. Not her!

Making her way to the guest room at the rear of the house, and into the bathroom beneath the slanted roof. Quickly—door shut and latched behind her as if there was a serious possibility that Virgil might come looking for her.

What is wrong with you? What has happened to you? Hiding from your own brother?

Actually it felt good to be hiding from Virgil. Felt good to be behaving as selfishly as Virgil behaved, and without apology.

But why was she panting? Was she panicked? As if this really was a game of hide-and-seek played with their old ferocity.

In the bathroom mirror a flushed face like a blowsy peony. Was that her?

The toilet lid, not plastic but wooden, covered in soft fuzzy pastel-pink, was down. Feeling weak, Beverly sat.

She was thirty-six. Her legs had grown fleshy, like her thighs, belly. Not that she was an overweight woman, she was not. Steve still called her my gorgeous wife. My Olympia. (Sometimes, meaning to be exotic, he’d called her my odalisque—but Beverly wasn’t sure she wanted to be one of those.) Standing too long, especially when she was tense, made her legs ache.

Hearing him—where, now?—at the side door, that led into the kitchen?

Beverly? It’s Virgil… But really his voice was too faint, she couldn’t hear.

The wild thought came to her: maybe Virgil had “snapped”—there was a good deal of “snapping” in the U.S. today—and had come to the house with a firearm, to slaughter her… Maybe the Zen Buddhist peace-lover had imploded, and was revealed as murderous.

Bev’ly? Hello…

A few more seconds and the knocking ceased.

Intensely she listened, hearing only the blood beating in her ears.

Was it safe? To emerge from the bathroom?

Her brother hadn’t forced his way into the house, had he?—hadn’t crept up the stairs, and was approaching her hiding place with the intent to—accost her?

What relief: no one.

At a front window she saw Virgil in shiny yellow bicycling away, out the driveway and along Stone Ridge Drive. As suddenly as the threat had appeared, it was disappearing.

Trembling! Her hands! Why on earth was she…

Why hidden from her brother when he’d needed her. Had something crucial to tell her.

“Oh, why!”

QUICKLY THEN, downstairs to check if Virgil had left a note stuck into the door. Front door, side door. Nothing.

And this too was a relief. (Was it?)

And quickly then calling their mother.

Oh why didn’t Jessalyn answer the phone? That was not like Jessalyn, if she was home.

Five rings, a forlorn sound.

Then Whitey’s solemn voice mail clicked on.

Hello. This is the McClaren residence. Unfortunately neither Jessalyn nor Whitey—that’s to say, John Earle—John Earle McClaren—can come to the phone at this time. If you will leave a detailed message, complete with your phone number, we will call you back as soon as we are able. At the sound of the beep.

Beverly left a message:

“Mom? Hi! Sorry to miss you. Guess who was just here just now—on that ridiculous bicycle of his—Virgil… I was upstairs and couldn’t get to the door in time so—he went away looking miffed. Any idea what is going on with him?”

Wanting to say what the hell is going on. But Beverly’s phone voice to her mother was her good-daughter voice, bright-glittering like bubbles on a stream beneath which, if you looked closely, you’d see sharp-edged rocks and rubble.

Hung up. Waited thirty seconds. Called back.

No answer. She was sure that Jessalyn should be home.

John Earle McClaren’s computer-voice recording like something out of a mausoleum.

If you will leave a detailed message… At the sound of the beep…

But by this time, late afternoon, Jessalyn should have been home. Beverly was the only person apart from Jessalyn who knew her mother’s weekday schedule virtually hour by hour.

Through Jessalyn she kept tabs on Whitey’s (much busier) schedule. He’d had a Hammond Public Library trustees’ meeting that day, downtown at the library.

Whitey had a cell phone, in theory. But he rarely took it with him. He didn’t want personal calls, and he didn’t want interruptions at the office.

Beverly called her sister Lorene at North Hammond High, where Lorene McClaren was principal. Had to leave a message with a secretary, of course; Lorene would never answer her own phone and if she had, she’d probably have been rude—Yes? What do you want, Bev?

“Just tell her—‘Please call Beverly immediately.’”

There was a pause. Beverly could hear the secretary breathing.

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’—? What?”

“You are a relative of Dr. McClaren? She is out of the office for the rest of the day…”

“‘Rest of the day’—why?”

“I think—I think—I think Dr. McClaren said—there is a ‘family emergency.’”

Beverly was astounded. “‘Family emergency’? What kind of—‘family emergency’?”

But the secretary was sounding frightened, as if she’d revealed too much. She would pass on Beverly’s message to Dr. McClaren, that was all she could do.

Family emergency. Beverly was frightened now.

Called her father’s number at McClaren, Inc. And here too a secretary informed her that Mr. McClaren was out of the office.

“When will he be back, do you know?”

“Mr. McClaren didn’t say.”

“This is Mr. McClaren’s daughter Beverly. I need to reach him. Can you give him a message…”

“Yes, ma’am. I will try.”

Oh, why didn’t Whitey carry a cell phone! Though Whitey did use a computer he was of the generation of Americans who were quietly waiting for the “electronic revolution” to go away.

Hurriedly then Beverly left the house. Jamming her key into the SUV ignition. She’d had time only to grab a corduroy jacket, her oversized purse, cell phone. It was crucial to get there—to the house on Old Farm Road.

There was no direct route. There was only a circuitous route. Long ago Beverly had memorized every turn, every intersection, every four-way and two-way stop, every blind corner and landmark of the slightly more than three miles between Stone Ridge Drive and Old Farm Road.

Fumbling with her cell phone trying to call her younger sister Sophia, who worked in a biology lab and (probably) had her cell turned off. Trying to call (again) Jessalyn who might now be home. And Lorene on Lorene’s cell phone—which was virtually always turned off.

Even Thom seventy miles away in Rochester—their big brother.

No one answered. All the phones went at once to voice mail.

It was eerie, unsettling. Like the end of the world.

Like the Rapture—and only Beverly left below, of the McClaren family.

In an emergency Whitey could be tracked down. Of course. During the day he would check in at the office for messages.

He’d said that he hoped to retire at the age of seventy—but that time was coming faster than he’d anticipated. No one believed that Whitey would retire before seventy-five. Or ever.

Your father’s secret is, he has to keep in motion.

Jessalyn had said this, admiringly. For Jessalyn was the still point in the McClaren family about whom the others revolved.

Their beautiful mother with the soft voice and unfaltering optimism.

Pleading now into the silence, “Mom? Aren’t you home? Pick up? Please?”

Family emergency—what could that mean?

Someone should have called Beverly. For it seemed that someone must have called Lorene.

Bitterly Beverly resented it, whoever had failed to call her. In fact, Lorene should have called her. Might’ve had her secretary call her.

As a little girl Beverly had tormented herself with the question: Which of her parents did she love best? If there were a car crash or an earthquake or fire which parent would she hope would survive to take care of her?

“Mommy.”

Immediately came the answer, unhesitatingly: Mommy.

All the children would have answered Mommy. When they’d been younger, at least.

They’d loved Mommy the most. Everyone who knew their mommy loved her. Yet, it was their father whose respect and admiration they sought, precisely because John Earle McClaren’s respect and admiration were not easy to attain.

Their mother loved them without qualification. Their father loved them, with many qualifications.

There was Whitey McClaren, good-natured and approachable. But there was John Earle McClaren who was capable of looking at you, forehead creased and eyes narrowed, as if he had no idea who the hell you were and why you were daring to take up his time.

In the McClaren family, sisters and brothers contended for the father’s attention. Each family occasion was a test of some sort from which you could not exclude yourself even if you’d had an idea how this might be done.

Like gold coins Whitey might toss at you with that special dimple-Daddy smile that signaled Hey kid. You know, I love you best.

“Oh. God.”

She thought too much about this. She knew.

It wasn’t that Whitey—their father—was rich, that was the surprising fact. If Whitey hadn’t a dime, if Whitey were in debt, they’d have felt the same way about him, Beverly was sure.

Like dirty water the memory washed over her: that birthday dinner she’d given for Virgil. Tried to give, and been rebuffed.

The first time she’d realized that Virgil didn’t love her. How rude, how indifferent he was, she counted for so little in his life. How embarrassing it was, to be so snubbed.

Poor Beverly!—she tries so hard.

Poor Mom!—the teenagers made mouths at one another, dangerously close to laughing, under their mother’s very nose.

A place at the beautifully decorated table—Virgil’s place—empty.

Like a missing tooth, an emptiness in the mouth which the tongue seeks, irresistibly.

“I spoke with him. Just the other day. I made it a point to—remind him. And he’d seemed…”

Jessalyn had laid her soft, calming hand on Beverly’s tremulous hand. Telling her not to feel bad—“It’s just a misunderstanding, I’m sure. Virgil would never—you know—be deliberately rude.”

Like one positioning to deliver a coup de grâce Lorene leaned forward on her elbows to smile cruelly across the table at them. “‘Would never’—what? You’re always making excuses for Virgil, Mom. Classic maternal ‘enabler.’”

“‘Enabler’… Well, I think I know what that means.”

But Jessalyn sounded uncertain. No one ever criticized her—she could not see, comprehend, somehow.

“Yes! An ‘enabler’ is one who ‘enables’ another individual to persist in addictive and self-destructive behavior. An enabler invariably ‘means well’ and her well-meaning can precipitate catastrophe. No one can dissuade her.”

Lorene spoke with zest. She was never so much in her element as when she was pointing out the flaws in others; her zinc-eyes glittered.

Her face was an unsentimental elf’s face—plain, small as if squeezed together, tough.

The other McClarens were intimidated by Lorene when she was most herself. Even Whitey preferred to stay out of the fray.

Sophia suggested driving over to Virgil’s cabin. She would volunteer.

Lorene said irritably: “That’s exactly what he wants. All of us jumping loops for him.”

“Jumping through hoops, I think you mean.”

“Don’t be flippant, Sophia. If there is anything that grates the soul, it’s adolescent flippancy—I am surrounded by it every day, and it’s destroying me. You know exactly what I mean, and you know that I’m right.”

At last Whitey spoke, somewhat reluctantly.

“Sophia, no. You will not drive over to get your brother. That would be approximately fourteen miles round-trip—you are not his keeper. Nor will we further interrupt this meal. Lorene is correct: we should not ‘enable’ Virgil to behave rudely.”

Lorene smiled, triumphant. Never too “mature” not to brighten when your parent corrects a sibling in front of everyone.

Beverly too rejoiced, inwardly. Her position, exactly! A family is a battleground, constantly shifting allies and enemies.

At the other end of the table (Beverly saw) Jessalyn pressed a hand to her heart, in silence. She was trying to smile, bravely. Obviously it pained her to hear the father of her children speak harshly of any of the children.

For any displeasure the father takes in their children has to be the mother’s fault, somehow.

Well, perhaps not entirely! That is an outmoded notion.

And yet—unavoidably, it did seem to be so. Like a table at a tilt, if just a very subtle tilt, the blame would roll down to Jessalyn’s end, where Jessalyn would put out her hand gently and unobtrusively to arrest it.

(Did Beverly feel that way, too? When Steve complained of the children?)

(You could not just shout at the man: They are your children, too! Whatever their faults, you are half to blame!)

“But, Daddy, what if something actual has happened to Virgil?” Sophia asked; and Thom said, with a wink, “Nothing ‘actual’ ever happens to Virgil. Haven’t you noticed?”

Thom, named for an older brother of Whitey’s who had died in the Vietnam War, had long been designated his father’s heir. In his late thirties he was still the aggressively competitive boy, smartest of the children, or in any case the most charismatic, very good-looking and sturdily adult-male, with a cruel, cutting smile. Even Jessalyn was fearful of his sarcasm though never in memory had Thom turned his wit upon either of his parents.

“We will eat this delicious meal which Beverly has prepared, without Virgil. If he joins us, we will welcome him. If he does not, we will not. We will begin.”

Whitey spoke somewhat flatly, not with his usual ebullience. The exchange had begun to annoy him, or to weary him. Beverly glanced at her father covertly.

He was an imposing man, big-boned, with the fatty-muscled build of a former athlete. In his mid-sixties he’d begun to lose height and so it was startling to his children to see him, and to realize that he wasn’t any longer as tall as they expected; though each time they saw him was a surprise, for they could only imagine him as he’d been when they had been growing up—well over six feet tall, weighing well beyond two hundred pounds. In repose his lined, boyish face was affable, big and broad with the look of an old coin, somewhat worn, of a faint coppery hue as if heated blood beat close beneath it. His eyes were wonderful eyes—quick, alert, wary, suspicious and yet good-natured, humorous—crinkled with laugh lines. When he’d been quite a young man his brown hair had turned a remarkable snowy-white, and had become his most distinguishable feature. In any crowd you could pick Whitey McClaren out immediately.

Though Whitey was not so easy to know, as people wished to think. His genial demeanor was a kind of mask that did not suggest the gravity of his soul; his playfulness, prankishness, was a way of hiding from others his intense and brooding seriousness, that was not always so very nice.

In his innermost heart, a puritan. Impatient with the foibles of the world. In particular, impatient with so much talk of his younger son.

Seeing him frown, Jessalyn caught Whitey’s eye. The length of the table between them, but instantaneously Whitey’s expression changed.

Whitey darling. Don’t fret! I love you.

It never ceased to amaze Beverly, how her parents could connect.

She was envious, perhaps. They all were.

Jessalyn said, “Whitey is right! If Virgil shows up he won’t mind at all if we begin dinner before him.”

They began. They ate. The meal, passing for Beverly in a buzzing blur, was to be pronounced a great success.

Beverly laughed as if delighted. Well—she was delighted.

Is this my life? Reduced to this? Humored by my family.

Humored, pitied by my children. Not a model for the girls!

But—better humored (and pitied) than not.

“MOM? HELLO…”

Nothing so unnerving as walking into a house that is unlocked—and, seemingly, empty.

A house that should not be unlocked. And should not be empty.

Beverly would long recall entering the house on Old Farm Road that afternoon. As it would come to be recalled—that afternoon.

Her parents’ house was more familiar to her than her own house yet, empty, made unfamiliar as in a distorted dream.

“Mom?”—her voice, confident elsewhere, thinned in this house to the voice of a frightened girl.

Well—no one appeared to be home. Beverly had entered into the kitchen, by the side door that was the door most frequently used.

That the kitchen door was unlocked did not mean that Jessalyn must be home; for Jessalyn often neglected to lock the door when she left the house, to Whitey’s displeasure if he knew.

“Mom? Dad?”—(but it was less likely that Whitey would be home, if Jessalyn were not home. It did not seem probable that Whitey could be home if Jessalyn were not home).

Bad news. Family emergency. Unmistakable. But—what?

Of the McClaren daughters it was Beverly who worried the most. You never get over being the oldest girl.

Their father had chided her: “It doesn’t do anyone any good to be always imagining the worst case scenario.”

Worst case scenario. As a girl she hadn’t quite known what it meant. Through the years the phrase had echoed in her memory as Worst Case Scenario.

Of course—(Jessalyn also understood)—Beverly imagined the Worst, in order to nullify its power. The Worst could never be exactly as you imagined it—could it?

Daddy stricken with a stroke, heart attack. In a car crash.

Mommy ill. Collapsed. Among strangers who had no idea how special she was. Oh—where?

Nervously Beverly went to check the front door—locked.

In all, there were several entrances to the McClarens’ house at 99 Old Farm Road. Most of these were kept locked most of the time.

The house was an “historic landmark” originally built in 1778, of fieldstone and stucco.

In its earliest incarnation it had been a farmhouse. A square-built stone house, two stories, to which a Revolutionary War general named Forrester had retired with his family and (according to local histories) at least one African-American slave.

By degrees the Forrester House, as it came to be called, was considerably enlarged. By the 1850s it had acquired two new wings, each the size of the original house, eight bedrooms and a “classic” facade with four stately white columns. By this time the farm property consisted of more than one hundred acres.

Through the early 1900s the village of Hammond grew into a fair-sized city, on the banks of the Erie Barge Canal, and began to surround the Old Farm Road farms. By 1929 much of the Forrester farmland had been sold and developed and by mid-century the area known as “Old Farm Road” had become the most exclusive neighborhood in Hammond, suburban yet still partly rural.

The elder McClarens had come to live in the Forrester House at 99 Old Farm Road when Thom was just a baby, in 1972. Much of early family lore had to do with fixing up a somewhat neglected property—about which the younger children knew little except these tales.

Why, if you were to believe their father, Daddy himself had painted many of the rooms of the house, or struggled to wallpaper the walls in comic-epic struggles. Paint that dried too bright—“eye-glaring.” Floral wallpaper strips not-quite-precisely matched so that you felt “like one-half of your brain was separated from the other.”

Mommy had chosen most of the furnishings. Mommy had “single-handedly, almost” created the several flower beds surrounding the house.

All of the McClaren children had grown up in the house, that no one in the family called the Forrester House. All of the children loved the house. So many years—decades!—Jessalyn and Whitey McClaren had lived here it was scarcely possible to imagine them elsewhere, or to imagine the house inhabited by anyone else.

Upsetting to Beverly, to imagine her parents seriously old, ill. Yet with a part of her mind Beverly imagined one day living in this beautiful house, to which she would restore the original name, with an historical plaque beside the front door: FORRESTER HOUSE.

(Whitey had removed this plaque as pretentious and “silly” as soon as they’d moved in. Hadn’t General Forrester been a slaveholder, like his revered comrade George Washington? Nothing to boast about!)

The Hammond Country Club was close by, to which she and Steve might belong, though the elder McClarens had never joined. Whitey hadn’t wanted to waste money on a country club since he rarely had time for golf, and Jessalyn hadn’t approved of the membership requirements—at the time, in the 1970s, the Hammond Country Club had not yet admitted Jews, Negroes, Hispanics, or “Orientals.”

Now, individuals from these categories could become members if they were nominated, and if they were voted in. If they could afford the application fee, and the dues. So far as Beverly knew, there were indeed Jews—a few. Probably not so many African-Americans, Hispanics. But a number of Asians? Yes. Half the roster of Hammond physicians.

Most nights, when Beverly dreamt, it was of the house on Old Farm Road she dreamt. Sometimes the house was the setting for the dream, and sometimes the house was the dream.

But, wait. This was not a good sign: newspaper pages scattered on a kitchen counter. Unlike Whitey who pored over newspapers in finicky detail, reading virtually every page, Jessalyn only read through the paper, turning pages quickly, often without sitting down. Usually the front-page news upset her, she had no wish to read it in detail and absolutely no interest in staring at photographs of wounded, dead, suffering human beings in faraway disasters. In any case Jessalyn would not have left newspaper pages scattered in the kitchen, as she would not have left dishes in the sink. Yet there were newspaper pages in the kitchen, and there were dishes in the sink.

Jessalyn had had to be surprised by something, and had departed the house suddenly. Whatever had happened, or had been revealed to her, it had been suddenly.

Beverly had checked: Jessalyn’s car was in the garage. Naturally, Whitey’s car was gone.

Since she wasn’t in the house Jessalyn must have departed in someone else’s vehicle.

Beverly searched for a note. For how often her mother had left notes for one or another of the children to discover, when they’d been growing up, even if she’d gone out for a very brief time.

It wasn’t just that Mom was “Mom”—to be precise, she was “Your Mom.”

For as long as Beverly could remember there’d been, on a wall behind the breakfast table, a cork bulletin board festooned with family snapshots, graduation photos, yellowed clippings from the Hammond Sun-Ledger—less frequently changed since the McClaren children had grown up and moved away.

When she’d prospered in high school Beverly had quite liked the family bulletin board in which Bev McClaren had been displayed to advantage in snapshots, newspaper photos and headlines. Varsity Cheerleaders Choose Captain: Bev McClaren. Senior Class Prom Queen: Bev McClaren. Most Popular Girl Class of ’86: Bev McClaren.

So long ago now she could barely remember. Felt not pride but a dislike for the bright-smiling girl in the pictures. In the strapless pink-chiffon prom dress like cotton candy, she’d had to tug up, hoping no one would notice, all night long. Damn strapless bra cutting into the flesh of her underarms and back. In the photo looking both glamorous and bereft for the tall handsome prom king beside her had been scissored out for whatever unforgivable transgression Beverly could barely recall.

In more recent photos Beverly was fleshy-faced but still attractive—if you didn’t look too closely. Her hair was highlighted to a radiant blond she’d never had as a girl. (She’d never needed as a girl.)

Of course, she’d never dare to wear anything strapless now. Anything that showed the bunchy flesh at her upper arms, and at her knees. Her teenaged children would erupt with horrified glee if they’d seen. Their mother might draw admiring glances from men in the street, at least men of a certain age, but she could not impress them.

When they’d been girls, Beverly had been the good-looking McClaren sister—(maybe, in some quarters, the sexy one)—while Lorene had been the brainy one. Sophia was too much younger to have competed.

In high school Lorene McClaren cut her hair short, “butch” style, wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses and a perpetual scowl. Not a bad-looking girl but nothing soft-edged about her though there’d been boys—(Beverly had always been astonished)—who’d found Lorene attractive, who had not seemed so impressed (indeed, Beverly had been baffled) with Beverly. Every picture of Lorene on the bulletin board showed a scowling smile, or a smiling scowl, through the years; it was remarkable, how relatively unchanged Lorene appeared. Face like a pit bull and personality to match—so Steve had said, meanly. But Beverly had laughed.

And there was Sophia. Wanly pretty, delicately boned, with a look of perpetual concern. It is hard to take seriously a sister nine years younger than you are.

Virgil—where was he? Beverly didn’t see a single picture of Virgil, come to think of it.

The bulletin board was festooned with numerous pictures of Whitey. Family snapshots, public photos. Here was Daddy presiding over a birthday cake blazing with candles, children tucked about him, and here was dignified John Earle McClaren, mayor of Hammond, in black tie, commemorating an anniversary of the opening of the Erie Barge Canal locks at Hammond, on a barge with local and state politicians.

Playful Whitey, silly Daddy, stiff-backed John Earle McClaren shaking hands with Governor Mario Cuomo of New York State on a stage banked with giant gladioli like sinister upright flower-swords.

But where was Jessalyn, among this profusion of snapshots and photos?

Beverly was dismayed: there appeared to be no pictures of Jessalyn except in group shots in which she was a small, peripheral figure. Beverly holding a baby, Thom with a toddler straddling his shoulders, Jessalyn looking on with a radiant-grandmother smile.

No pictures of Jessalyn alone. And no pictures of Jessalyn at all that were less than twenty years old.

“As if Mom doesn’t exist.”

So long Jessalyn had been the perfect wife and mother, invisible. So happily living for others, she scarcely lives at all.

Her husband adored her of course. When they were young the children had been embarrassed seeing Daddy kiss Mommy’s hand, hug Mommy and burrow his face against her neck in a kind of rough play that offended them to have to witness. How mortified they were, seeing their parents greet each other with something like tenderness!—it did not seem right, in persons so old.

Yet, Whitey took Jessalyn utterly for granted as they all did. He didn’t know it, and Jessalyn didn’t know it. But it was so.

They’d tried to convince their mother to spend money on herself, not just presents for other people.

But, but—what would she get for herself? Jessalyn had stammered.

Clothes, a new car.

She had more clothes than she could wear in a lifetime, Jessalyn protested. She had fur coats. She had a new car.

“Don’t be silly, Mom. Your car is not new.”

“Your father oversees my cars, as you know. I need a car only to drive a few miles, and back. It isn’t as if I am a world traveler.”

World traveler—they’d laughed. Jessalyn was very funny at times.

“And why do I need new clothes? I have such beautiful clothes. I have a mink coat your father insisted upon giving me that I never wear. I have ridiculously expensive jewelry—to wear in Hammond! And shoes—far too many shoes! But I am just me.”

Not that they were laughing at her. Their laughter was tender, protective.

It was so, Whitey was the one to oversee household expenditures. He’d insisted upon a lavish kitchen renovation a few years ago, which Jessalyn had resisted; he was the one who became obsessed with granite counters, Spanish tile floor, recessed lighting, state-of-the-art stainless steel stove, refrigerator, sink. Beautiful as something in a glossy magazine, and very expensive.

“Just for us? Me? I’m not even a serious cook…” Jessalyn had stammered with embarrassment.

Whitey was the one who oversaw the exterior of the house—the condition of the roof and chimneys and driveway, snow removal, landscaping, care of shrubs and tall aging trees. Jessalyn’s idea of reckless spending was buying flowering plants for her garden, wind chimes for the deck, the “very best” wild-bird seed, the kind that contained dark sunflower seeds amid the more common corn kernels, to attract fancier birds like cardinals.

Yet Whitey often said, with an air of protest—It’s not like we’re rich. We are not.

It had become a joke within the family, and within the McClarens’ circle of friends.

We’re not rich! Jesus.

With an expression like Groucho Marx’s. Not rich! Not us.

In fact, how rich were the McClarens? Their neighbors assumed that the McClarens had as much money as anyone else on Old Farm Road. Within the Hammond business community, it was understood that McClaren, Inc. was “profitable.” But this was a sensitive subject the children never wished to discuss as, growing up, they would not have wished to discuss their parents’ sex lives.

Beverly winced, considering. No!

Still, it was known that, as a young man, Whitey McClaren had been given the responsibility of the McClaren family business to run, a commercial press in (evident) decline; within a decade Whitey had managed to double, treble, quadruple the company’s size and profits by dropping old-time, small-scale printing jobs (menus, calendars, flyers for local businesses, material for the Hammond Board of Education) and specializing in glossy brochures for professional schools, businesses, pharmaceutical companies. Unskilled in what he called “high tech”—(anything to do with computers)—Whitey had cannily hired a young staff skilled in computers and digital publishing. He’d begun a line of school textbooks and YA books with a Christian slant, which had proved unexpectedly successful.

Thom, the eldest, had been (tacitly) selected by their father to work with him at the press even before he’d graduated from Colgate with a degree in business administration; it was Thom who directed Searchlight Books, with headquarters in Rochester.

How is the business doing, Thom?—Lorene might inquire through clenched teeth; and Thom would reply with a disingenuous smile—Ask Dad.

Yet you could not, really. You could not ask Dad.

Whitey had invested in real estate, and he was a co-investor in several shopping malls, that had prospered as the downtowns of old, industrial cities (Buffalo, Port Oriskany) had faded. Though on principle he didn’t “believe” in most pills and drugs which (he was sure) were no better than placebos, he’d purchased stock in the pharmaceutical companies for which he published his lavish brochures.

While other investors had lost money in the Wall Street debacles of recent years, Whitey McClaren had prospered.

He hadn’t boasted, however. Whitey never spoke of money at all.

None of the McClaren children wanted to think about their parents’ wills. Or even if they had wills.

“Hello? Steve…”

After several tries Beverly had managed to get through to her husband at the Bank of Chautauqua. Before Steve could interrupt she told him excitedly that she was feeling desperate, she was at her parents’ house and no one seemed to be here—she had no idea where anyone was and before this Virgil had bicycled to their house but had gone away again before Beverly could find out what was wrong…

“It isn’t a great time to talk, Bev. I’m headed for a crucial meeting…”

“But, wait—this is crucial too. I think that something must have happened… I don’t know where anyone is.”

“Call me back in a few hours, OK? Or—I’ll call you.” Steve was a senior loan officer at the Bank of Chautauqua who took his work very seriously, or gave that impression to his family.

“No, wait—I told you, I don’t know where anyone is.”

“Probably nothing. They’ll explain. See you tonight.”

How like Steve to respond to an anxious call from his wife with all the nuance of a boys’ sports coach. You blink back tears, the man hands you a stick of gum.

Oh, she hated him! She could not depend upon him.

So often it was like this. Steve brushed her away as you’d brush away an annoying gnat. Not angry with her, nor even irritated, just—it’s a gnat.

Always Beverly was suggesting to Lorene how wonderful it was to be married. To have a family. She could not bear her sneering younger sister to know how Steve disrespected her, so often.

Married seventeen years. Sometimes she wondered if that was a few years too long.

The ungrateful husband would miss her, she thought, if she didn’t come home to make supper. All of them, her dear family, would miss her then.

Trailing through the house. Bev? Mom?

Nothing in the kitchen? No food being prepared?

Another time, Beverly tried calling Lorene. Futile to try Lorene’s office, Beverly could never get past Lorene’s assistant, so she tried the cell phone, also usually futile, but this time, unexpectedly, Lorene answered at once.

“Yes? Hello? Oh—Beverly…”

Lorene was sounding anxious, distracted. Saying she was at Hammond General in downtown Hammond where their father was undergoing emergency surgery for a stroke.

The initial surprise, Lorene had answered her phone. For Lorene never answered her cell phone.

But what was Lorene saying?—Daddy has had a stroke?

Beverly fumbled for a chair. Her nightmare come true.

She’d tried to nullify bad news by anticipating it. So often, she’d tried this superstitious ploy. Her father stricken, her mother, both parents—family emergency. Somehow, she had not—quite—believed that the Worst Case Scenario could ever occur.

“Calm down, Beverly. He isn’t dead.”

“Oh my God, Lorene—”

“I told you, calm down. Stop that wailing! Daddy has been in surgery for almost an hour. He had a stroke driving home on the Expressway but he’d been able to pull over to the side—thank God! Police officers saw his car there and called 911—looks like they saved his life.”

Beverly was trying to make sense of this. She was badly shaken and could not hear her sister’s voice clearly.

Except she did hear Lorene say: “Everyone is here at the hospital except you, Beverly. And you live the closest.”

And: “I tried to call you, Beverly. On the way to the hospital. But your phone doesn’t seem to be working.”

Was this an accusation? Which phone? Beverly tried to protest but Lorene said, “Thank God for those police officers. Thank God Daddy was able to park the car at the side of the road, before losing consciousness.”

“But—is he going to be all right?”

“‘Is he going to be all right’—” Lorene’s voice swelled in sudden fury. “How can you ask such an inane question? Do you think I can predict the future? Jesus, Beverly!”—pausing then, to say in a calmer voice, as if someone with her (Jessalyn?) had admonished her, “They did an fMRI—they think the stroke was not ‘massive’ and it’s a good sign, Daddy is—almost—breathing on his own.”

Almost breathing on his own. What did that mean…

“I—I—I’m just so—shocked…”

Beverly was feeling light-headed. But she must not faint!

“We’re all shocked, Bev. What the hell d’you think?”

How she disliked Lorene. The brainy middle sister who’d always been too certain of herself, bossy, smug. Not for a moment did Beverly believe that Lorene had made any actual attempt to call her, on any phone.

“Is Mom there? I’d like to speak with Mom, please.”

“All right. But don’t upset Mom with your hysteria please.”

Fuck you. I hate you. Beverly was eager to console her mother (who had to be frantic with anxiety) but, as it turned out, Jessalyn seemed determined to console her.

“Beverly! Thank God you called. We were wondering where you were. Virgil tried to contact you—he said. There is good news—I mean, the doctors are ‘optimistic.’ Whitey is receiving the very best care. His friend Morton Kaplan is chief resident here and Dr. Kaplan arranged for Whitey to be given the fMRI at once, and taken into surgery—it all happened so fast. By the time Lorene and I arrived. We’ve been assured that Whitey has the very neurosurgeon available, the very best neurologist…” In a slow careful voice Jessalyn spoke like one making her way across a tightrope, who dares not glance down. Beverly could imagine her distraught mother smiling a ghastly smile. For how like Jessalyn McClaren it was, to assure others that all was well.

Jessalyn had enunciated “Morton Kaplan” as if the syllables possessed magical properties testifying to Whitey McClaren’s connections with the Hammond medical elite—exactly as Whitey would have done in such circumstances.

“It’s a miracle, Beverly—what they can do today. As soon as Whitey arrived at the ER they did a ‘screen’ of his brain—there was a blood vessel that had ruptured the surgeon is going to repair… Oh sorry, Lorene tells me it’s scan. A brain scan.”

Beverly shuddered at the thought of her father subjected to neurosurgery. His skull drilled open, baring his brain…

“Mom, do you need anything from the house? Any clothes?”

“Just bring yourself, Beverly! And pray for Dad! We are hoping that he will wake from the surgery sometime tonight, and he will want all of you here if he does. He loves you all so much…”

Pray for Dad. It wasn’t like Jessalyn to speak this way.

Lorene took the phone back from their mother whose voice had begun to quaver and told Beverly yes, good idea, bring things for Whitey, underwear, toothbrush and toothpaste, comb, toiletries—one of Jessalyn’s sweaters, the hand-knit heather cardigan, she’d come away dressed too lightly; she’d run out of the house when Lorene drove up, and they’d gone at once to the hospital.

Reproach in Lorene’s voice. As if she were scolding subordinates at the high school.

Hastily Beverly packed a small suitcase upstairs in her parents’ bedroom. Her hands were shaking. Her eyes were filling with tears. Dear God let Daddy be all right. Let the surgery save him. Except at such desperate times Beverly had not much use for God.

Who knew how long Whitey would be hospitalized! Days, a week—even if the stroke was minor, it would (probably) require therapy; it would require rehab. Maybe bring a (flannel, plaid) nightgown of Whitey’s, he’d hate hospital attire and insist upon his own bedclothes. Poor Whitey, how he hated to appear weak.

Jessalyn would insist upon staying with Whitey as much as possible and Beverly was determined to stay with her.

Dear God. Please!

Hurried from the house. But then, at her car, remembered that the kitchen door wasn’t locked, and hurried back to lock it.

Remembered to leave a light on downstairs. Two lights. To suggest that someone was home, the beautiful old stone Forrester House with the steep-slanted slate roof set back from the road at 99 Old Farm Road wasn’t empty, vulnerable to invasion.

“GRANDPA WHITEY IS SICK. WE’RE at the hospital with him.”

“Oh.” The girl’s voice was small as a pinprick. Her usual sarcasm had vanished in an instant.

“We don’t know how serious it is. We don’t know when he will come home.”

Brianna had called Beverly on her cell sounding peevish and exasperated. She’d been waiting for forty minutes at a friend’s house for Beverly to pick her up and bring her home and—(how was it possible?)—Beverly had totally forgotten.

“I’m sorry, honey. It’s an emergency. You can defrost something from the refrigerator for supper. OK?”

“Oh, Mom—gosh.”

Beverly had not heard her teenaged children speak so solemnly to her, so respectfully, in a very long time. A sensation of giddy relief washed over her.

She wanted to hug the girl. Oh, she loved Brianna!

Even the bratty ones, you love. Especially the bratty ones because no one else is going to love them like their mother.

A little later, Beverly’s cell phone rang again. She left the Intensive Care room to take the call in the corridor.

Again, it was Brianna. Asking, anxiously: “Should we come to visit Grandpa?”

“Maybe, honey. But not right now.”

“Is it a—heart attack, Mom?”

“No. It’s a stroke.”

“Oh. A stroke.” Again the voice went small, frightened.

“You know what a stroke is, don’t you?”

“Y-Yes. Sort of…”

“Grandpa has had neurosurgery. He’s still unconscious.”

“How sick is that?”

“How sick? We really don’t know, honey. We’re waiting.”

Very sick. His brain has been bleeding.

Not so sick, Grandpa is “improving.”

“Is Granma Jess OK?”

“Granma Jess is OK.”

Beverly heard herself say in her heartening-mother voice: “You know Grandpa Whitey, he’d never complain. Except he’d hate to be cooped up in a damn old hospital bed and he’d want to come home right now.”

It was a breathless outburst. Beverly steeled herself for the girl’s response—You are so full of shit, Mom! What d’you think I am, a little kid you can bullshit like that?

But Brianna said, in a rush of words, bravely, “T-Tell Grandpa we love him. Tell Grandpa get well soon and come home.”

Beverly could all but see tears shining in the girl’s eyes. Oh thank God after all she was a mother.

IT WOULD BE SEVEN HOURS and forty minutes before Beverly returned to her own house on Stone Ridge Drive, to her sober-faced husband and teenaged children who’d waited up for her past midnight.

Whitey was out of surgery and in Intensive Care, still alive if not (yet) conscious; the prognosis was “guardedly optimistic”—his condition was “critical, but stabilized.”

How did Whitey look? Well—not like Whitey.

Yes, you could recognize him. Of course! But (maybe) Whitey wouldn’t have recognized himself.

Very bruised, battered-looking. Welts in his skin like burns—his face, neck. For (police officers had reported) he’d crashed the Toyota Highlander at the side of the Expressway, and the air bags had “burnt” him.

Alive. Dad is alive.

Still alive! We love him so.

Before returning to her own home Beverly had driven back to the family house with the others to see their mother to bed—by that time everyone was there, all five McClaren children—Beverly had not wanted not to be with them—and she was now staggering with exhaustion. Yet her brain felt perversely clear to her, bright-lit, as if it had been hosed clean, a terrible instrument of clarity.

She needed Whitey in her life, desperately. They all did, but Beverly most of all.

Without Whitey to give a sort of anchor to her life—what would be her life? And an anchor, a rightness to her marriage. Steve admired and feared his father-in-law in about equal measure and without Whitey as a presence in their lives, without the support and approval of both her parents, Beverly’s own family, including even the children she most loved, would not seem altogether—(Beverly hesitated to think this)—worth it.

Oh but she didn’t mean any of this. Just—tired, and scared.

Pleading with God to Let Daddy be all right. Oh please!

NEXT MORNING AT 6:30 A.M. as she was hastily leaving the house Beverly happened to notice, blown against the side of the garage, a scrap of paper. Grunted to pick it up, and saw to her mortification that it was a note from Virgil after all.

Must’ve stuck it in the door, and it had fallen out.

Still Alive

Hey! Let me explain.

But it isn’t clear: What can Whitey explain?

Problem is this burning sensation in his throat. No voice.

Eyesight all blotched. Like someone has rubbed ashes into his eyes.

And—breathing? Was he breathing?

Something is breathing for him. Like force-feeding. Pumping air into his lungs in an ugly chuffing like a bellows.

What happened was…

… struck by lightning.

Confused memory of his vehicle bouncing, jolting along the shoulder of the highway. Potholes, the kind you don’t see until it’s too late, God damn you can ruin a tire that way but you won’t know it immediately, the air will hiss out slowly and one day (soon) the (not cheap!) tire will be flat.

Trying hard to remember why he’d stopped. Leaving the highway at a high speed (?). Trying to remember what happened next.

Trying so hard, the effort is hurting his brain.

(But why assume that something actually happened? Maybe this condition he’s in is just—him.)

(Always liked to take the contrary position, if there was one. Even as a kid. Schoolteachers, smiling and shaking their heads at Johnny McClaren—long-ago as grade school. Flattering to Whitey all his life to be told he sounds like a lawyer. Except he isn’t a lawyer.)

Last memory has to be a face: glimpsed at a distance, as in a telescope in reverse.

Dark-skinned face. Dusky-skinned.

Stranger’s face. He thinks.

(Or were there more than one of them?—faces.)

Face recognition at birth. He’d read. Infant’s neurons “fire” at the sight of a human face.

Because survival can depend upon recognizing a human face. Does depend.

Is that true at the end—also?

End? Of what?

Can remember, must’ve been junior high, reading Scientific American. “Steady-state universe.”

Well, that was comforting. Never had to wonder what had come before the universe, or what would come after. Universe just was.

Made more sense than that God had “created” the universe in a few days like a stage magician pulling things out of hats. Even as a kid he’d never taken that seriously.

But then, the big bang was—(how’d you phrase it?)—discovered.

So the universe isn’t “steady”—isn’t a “state”—but erupted out of nothingness at a point before time began and is still exploding outward billions of years later. Are its components rushing away from the center, and from one another, forever and ever?—or just for a fixed time?

Not a theory. He thinks. Proven fact: Hubble telescope.

Jessalyn laughed and pressed her hands over her ears. Oh, Whitey! It makes me dizzy to think about that.

Think about—what?

Eternity.

This was a surprise to Whitey. Hadn’t expected to hear his young wife utter such a word, and the expression in her face suddenly serious—pained.

Hadn’t known that’s what they’d been talking about—eternity.

In fact he’d just been talking. Something out of the newspaper. Like Whitey McClaren, every crazy thing sifts through his brain and awakens some spark there.

It was like her, though. The young wife. Say something to her, any random remark, off-the-top-of-his-head, in Jessalyn it acquired meaning, gravity.

Other girls he’d joked with. Liked to laugh.

But with Jessalyn Sewell, you didn’t. Not much.

Hearing himself say What the hell, maybe we should get married and another girl might’ve laughed knowing it was, or maybe was not, not-serious but Jessalyn lifted her beautiful eyes to his—Yes. All right.

That look, piercing him to the heart. He’d felt it—actually: not a mere figure of speech—beneath his breastbone. Tough muscle-heart, pierced with certainty.

For he’d known (hadn’t he) from the start. Only one person like Jessalyn Sewell in his life who could make John Earle McClaren a better human being not (merely) accept him as he was, who could love him for what he might be, his deepest self. In this individual the gravity required to keep Whitey McClaren’s helium-soul from drifting up into the clouds, and lost.

Funny he’s having such difficulty talking now, he who’d always been an easy talker. Never shy even as a kid. Oh Whitey! He can converse with anyone. Strike up a conversation anywhere. Any stranger.

But that had not happened, had it. Feeling the chagrin, the hurt, of an obscure rebuff.

Kick in the stomach, groin. That kind of rebuff.

Whoever it had been, they hadn’t liked him. Hadn’t been charmed by him. Problem is, he’s old.

Problem is, he’s cold.

Teeth chattering. Feels like bones chattering. That chit-chit-chittering noise the long-billed long-legged herons made, sends a shiver up the spine.

Problem is, some careless person (attendant?) has left a window open here.

Wherever here is.

Rushing wind. Rain-splatter flung like tears.

From where he’s lying, where the bastards have pinioned him, and with this God damn respirator down his throat, can’t move to reach the damned window to shut it.

He has glimpsed her—his wife. The young wife, face lit from within.

His dear wife. Has he forgotten her name?

Wife—the word is a burr in his throat.

Can’t speak. Words like thorns. Trying to cough up the thorns, to clear his throat to speak.

Has forgotten—speak.

Reaches for her hand—but he is being pulled from her.

Darling?—I love—

The wind is rushing, can’t hear.

It is so tempting, to give up!

So tempting, so tired. His legs heavy…

Not like Whitey McClaren, to give up. God damn he will not.

Never a good swimmer, his legs are too heavy. But he is swimming now. Trying.

Wind-buffeted waves. Very hard to swim against. Swift current. Cold.

Barely, keep afloat. Just—his head—uplifted, at tremendous strain. One breath at a time.

Swimming wasn’t his sport. Hadn’t the right body-shape to cut through the water. Too inward. Throwing you back on your own thoughts, not good.

Football was his sport. Running, careening together, tangling legs, head-butts, piling-on… Tackling: that word, he’d loved.

Loved the sweat-smell, his own and the other guys’. And the dirt-smell.

Swimmers stink of chlorine, too clean. Up your nostrils. Christ!

Touch another guy in the pool, brush legs, what the hell… Repulsive like lizard-skin.

Harsh clean chemical-smell in this damned place: antiseptic.

Germ-free. Bacteria-free.

What did his scientist daughter say: Life is bacteria, Daddy.

The kids, how’d they grow up so fast? Turned his back, there was Thom moved out of town. Beverly, pregnant. Slap in the face but no, not right to think that way.

You know better, Whitey. Please.

You can’t possibly be jealous of your own son-in-law.

And now grandchildren. Too many! Names slipping from him like water through outspread fingers.

Christ, life is a struggle. Anybody who tells you anything else is a liar.

The greatest effort—breathe…

Pushing, shoving. Trying to get free, to breathe. Shouts of strangers in his face, booted feet kicking. Two of them.

Had that been real? Had it?

Electrocuted. He’d stepped, or fallen, onto a wire cracking electricity…

His face. Throat. Afire.

Is he—dead?

Not possible. Ridiculous.

But in this rough-rippling current, a dark wind. Frantic exertion of arms, legs. His strong shoulders, or shoulders that had once been strong only days ago. Arms like frantic blades propelling him upward.

Can’t give up. Can’t drown. Love you so…

Oh God, love you all.

The Handclasp

It is a late hour, she is very tired.

Love you so, darling. We are all right here.

Saying his name. Many times saying his name certain that though unresponsive, he can hear her.

Numbly her lips move. Almost inaudibly.

Yet she doesn’t doubt, her dear husband can hear her.

Doesn’t doubt, her dear husband is aware of her.

How old he looks! Poor Whitey, vain about his age since (at least) fifty. And now—sixty-seven.

His handsome face now scarcely recognizable. Skin like creased parchment. Bruised, swollen where he’d struck the steering wheel or the windshield thrown forward in the crash.

Stroke preceding the crash. Or—had the stroke followed the crash?

Possibly, she has been told. Possibly, she has forgotten.

Police officers arrived at the scene, called 911, saved Whitey’s life.

Scene of the accident. No witnesses.

ER physician saying it looked like burn-wounds on the patient’s face, throat, hands. Scorch-marks on his clothing they’d had to cut away.

Speculating the air bag had exploded, bruising and battering. Acid may have splattered out of the air bag which sometimes happens.

Air bag injuries can be considerable. If you are small-boned, slender, a child, elderly, don’t sit in the passenger’s seat. Exploding air bags can kill.

Can you hear me, darling? You are going to be all right…

Leaning close, scarcely daring to breathe. All the strength of her being is required to keep her husband with her.

Holding his (right) (bruised) hand. But his hand is not holding hers.

First time in memory, she is sure. First time in fifty years Whitey’s large strong warm hand has not grasped hers.

If he knew, he would console her. Protect her. All I’ve been meant to do on earth, Jess—take care of you.

Joking but serious. Every other word out of the man’s mouth a joke, but serious too. Easy to misunderstand such a person.

Still alive. He is still alive.

Not sure of the extent of the stroke, just yet. What it will mean.

Which areas of the brain are affected, contiguous with the stroke-region.

She has heard the word—stabilized. She is certain that she heard this word and that she has not imagined it.

After surgery. Repairing (broken) blood vessels. Brain shunt to drain liquid. Catheter threaded into the brain through a hole in the skull. A second catheter subcutaneous, traveling down into Whitey’s abdomen, draining away there. The shunt is the life-saver.

Bargaining with God. Please God let him live. Please God we love him so.

She is very cold. One of her daughters has pulled a sweater onto her shoulders, that keeps sliding off.

Blood has drained out of her face. Her lips are cold and numb as death.

Holding his hand. Cannot give up his hand. No matter how tired she is, how dazed. For (she is certain) that his hand can feel hers even if it does not exert any strength and remains limp in her hand and alarmingly cold.

If she releases his hand, it will fall heavily onto the edge of the bed.

Not like Whitey McClaren, a cold handshake.

Not like Whitey McClaren not to squeeze his wife’s hand in his, bring it to his chest in a protective gesture that pulls her forward, awkwardly.

But he does not. The hand does not.

Hours she has been at his bedside. A high bedside, surrounded by machines.

How many hours coalesced into a single hour like something gigantic growing exponentially—iceberg, snow-mountain.

The larger the object, the more surface-area. The more surface-area, the most rapidly the object will grow.

It is not a quiet place. Even the Intensive Care Unit which you would expect to be quiet is not.

He will sleep, he will rest. He is exhausted.

He will be himself again—when he has rested.

Someone has told her this. She has half-listened, she has wanted to believe. It is comforting to her, that every nurse, every medical worker, every physician she has met tonight, has been so very kind.

The Intensive Care nurses are particularly kind. She will remember their names, Rhoda, Lee Ann, Cathy, she will want to thank them once the vigil is over.

Of course she has visited many relatives, friends in the hospital in her lifetime. She is not young: sixty-one. She has seen many people die, and most of them elderly and infirm—as her husband is not.

Not elderly, at sixty-seven. Not infirm!

Whitey has not been in a hospital for decades. He’d boasted. Appendicitis when he was thirty, once in the ER when he’d broken a wrist in a fall (in fact, he’d lost his footing on steps, carrying a heavy suitcase: an accident). Good to avoid hospitals, Whitey liked to joke. People die in hospitals all the time.

Edgy laughter, at Whitey McClaren’s jokes.

She smiles, recalling. Then wonders why she is smiling.

Something slipping from her shoulders. One of her daughters catches the thick woolen sweater before it falls to the floor.

Oh, Mom. You’re exhausted. It’s not helping Daddy, or any of us, wearing yourself out like this.

Let me drive you home. We will come back in the morning.

Daddy will be all right, Mom. You heard the doctor—he has “stabilized.”

She is thinking: if they could die at the exact same moment, then it would be—well, not good; but nowhere near as bad as if one or the other dies first.

Terrifying, to think of Whitey dying first. How will she endure, the remainder of her life without him!

Yet worse, if she dies first, and Whitey is bereft…

Hiding his face against her throat. In his big, damply-hot arms. Stricken with love for her, clumsy in speech that is sincere and not joking, bantering. Oh. I love you.

She tells the children: if they stay at the house during the emergency, Whitey would like that. When he comes home.

(Maybe tomorrow? Day after tomorrow? Considering that his condition has stabilized.)

Strange, the daughters are not girls any longer. Beverly, Lorene. Well, you could say that Sophia is still a “girl”—could be mistaken for a girl in her early twenties. Younger.

(She feared for Sophia who did not seem to be maturing as the other girls had. There was a schoolgirl earnestness about Sophia, a defiant sort of naivete, that worried her mother even as [she sensed] it annoyed the older sisters.)

(And how old is Sophia? Tried to recall when Sophia had graduated from college—Cornell, after transferring from Hobart Smith.)

(Oh, it is confusing, frightening: which year this is, which month; how old they are all becoming, like heedless tobogganers rushing downhill through the blinding-white snow of their own, finite lives!)

Still, managing to smile. At the nurses, at the girls’ strained faces, at poor dear Whitey whose swollen and distended mouth can’t smile in return at her.

(And where is Thom? He’d been here earlier. And Virgil.)

(Well. You don’t expect Virgil to stay in one place for long. What has Sophia said of her brother—Attention deficit disorder. Given a spiritual spin.)

No wonder the boys aren’t here. Somewhere in the hospital probably, but not right here.

Both Whitey’s sons were frightened. Seeing their father so helpless-seeming, somehow crooked in the high hospital bed amid a tangle of beeping machines and a powerful smell of disinfectant, and his face burnt-looking, battered and swollen; his eyes not exactly shut but not open, and not seeing. Dread word stroke. Dread words Intensive Care, respirator. Thom’s eyes had misted over as if in pain and Virgil’s eyes had narrowed to slits as if a bright light were shining into his face.

With a mother’s sharp eye she’d seen how each son swallowed hard as a way of not sobbing aloud.

Terror of a (grown, adult) child seeing his parent so diminished.

You want to spare them such shocks. Fleeting thoughts through her life as a mother, if she could hide away somewhere, when mortally ill. If she could prevent their seeing, their knowing until it was all over—fait accompli.

Her own mother had sent away her children, in her final days. Vanity, desperation. Don’t want you to see me like this.

But John Earle is not mortally ill, in fact. The facial injuries have nothing to do (it seems) with the stroke and are (it seems) superficial.

Angry red swellings on his face, throat, hands. As if some creature had sunk its beak into him. How many times?

She would wonder what has caused these curious injuries. Except in her distracted state she is capable only of smiling.

Smiling as an act of will. Smiling as an act of courage, desperation.

Giving Whitey’s hand a gentle squeeze as you urge a child. Darling! We are all here, or almost. We will stay until they make us leave.

(Was that so? Would the hospital make them leave? Intensive Care? When the day shift ends?)

It is just a coincidence. She thinks.

Tried to bring up the subject with Whitey, the other day.

The Subject. No!

Of course, Whitey reacted with his (usual) panicked joking. Making a (comic) fuss over the coffee machine. Pretended not to hear.

Just the two of them now in the sprawling house on Old Farm Road that had once been the very center of—everything! You could count on a pack of kids occupying the premises at any time. Five children, five sets of friends. (Well, that wasn’t accurate perhaps. By the time Virgil was old enough to bring friends home, Thom was too old to wish to bring his friends home; not to mention those girlfriends of Thom’s he hadn’t dared bring home.) How many for supper? How many?—Whitey pretended to be exasperated but (really) he’d loved the house bustling with life.

Those years. You’d think would go on forever. Parents of the kids’ school friends calling the McClarens to see where their children were, and usually they were there, at the sprawling house on Old Farm Road.

And now, where?—where had all those kids, all that noisy life, scattered?

Last to leave home had been Sophia, who’d had only two or three close girlfriends. And Virgil, who’d had a motley assortment of friends, weird friends, who’d come and gone, and seemed not to count. So the diminution, the loss, had been gradual, not abrupt.

Why on earth is she wiping tears from her eyes! It is not like the children’s mother, to alarm them.

For after the terrible shock of the emergency, after the hours of surgery, Whitey was all right.

Thinking what they need are children who live in distant cities and will come to visit them, bring their grandchildren and stay.

It’s a fact: when your children live nearby they never stay in the house any longer. Visit, yes. Come to dinner maybe. For a few hours.

Then they go home. Their home is elsewhere.

She is trying to explain this to Whitey. How sad she is, how frightened, their home is slipping through their fingers.

(Is this a joke? Squeezing her husband’s limp cold fingers trying to galvanize them into life.)

What an odd-matched pair. Jessalyn so quiet, and Whitey so— Whitey.

Yet often when they’re alone together it is Jessalyn who speaks to Whitey earnestly and persuasively, at length. No one would believe how in her quiet voice Jessalyn explains to her husband how he should reconsider a decision he has made impulsively. She will say Darling, please just listen. I think you need to reconsider…

Whitey has never disagreed with Jessalyn. He has never argued with her. Though Whitey McClaren can be curt and dismissive with others he has never so much as interrupted his wife in fifty years.

In fact he loves to be corrected by her. Chagrined, humbled by her. It is delightful to him, to be proved wrong by his dear wife.

Well, all right. Now you put it that way, I guess—you are correct.

She is his best self, he tells her. His bright angel.

Of all the world, she was/is his salvation. Not in the next world but in this. Only Jessalyn could make of John Earle McClaren the person he was meant to be—so he has told her as he has told others.

Is it rare, that a husband can be so assertive in his dealings with others, yet so compliant in his dealings with his wife? Of course, the harsh term dealings does not quite apply.

He’d fallen in love just once in his life. Seeing Jessalyn at seventeen. Shy, soft-spoken, demure.

But frankly very pretty. John Earle had stared and stared at her face, her smooth-plaited hair. Her breasts.

She’d seen. That helplessness in a man’s face. A boy’s face. No one can moralize, no one can legislate.

Might as well call it love.

Their first time, holding hands. Johnny Earle had seemed embarrassed. He’d wanted to hold Jessalyn’s hand—tight; but (he said) he hadn’t wanted to “mangle” it.

She’d laughed. She had never, ever forgotten—mangle.

You can mangle my hand now, darling.

She’d been slower to fall in love with John Earle McClaren whose personality was so strongly defined, even in his early twenties. But eventually, she had fallen in love. She had not resisted.

Wishing he would grip her hand hard—yes, now.

But it is not Jessalyn’s way, she is resolved. To burden another with your need for them.

Better to be the one to take the other’s hand. Firmly.

As for so many years—an inexhaustible span of time, she’d thought—she had gripped a child’s hand, often the hands of two children, crossing a street, in a public place, on a flight of stairs—“Chick-chick!” had been her signal, in an undertone, a cheerful sound, a sound to alert the child, yes it is necessary, Mommy wants your hand.

Without hesitation, the child lets you take his/her hand. Nothing quite so wonderful, that trusting grip.

Her terror had been that one of the children would slip from her grasp and run into a street, or—in some other way manage to kill or maim herself when for a fleet moment Mommy had not been alert.

Mom? We’re taking you home now.

We’ll be back first thing in the morning.

Jessalyn is reluctant to leave Whitey’s bedside. Oh, how can she abandon poor ravaged Whitey! When Whitey’s eyes flutter open, the first face he sees should be hers.

Of course, I’m here. I will always be here.

Stares at her watch confused for a moment if it might be morning, not night. And where exactly is this place?

Whitey seems to take up less space in this hospital bed than he does in their bed at home where the mattress sags comfortably on his side. Each night sleeping with Whitey has been an adventure: Whitey sprawls, sighs, turns restlessly in the night, flings an arm over her, or an arm in her direction; wakes, or seems to wake, with a clicking sound in his throat, but sinks back into sleep at once like one sinking beneath the surface of water, deep, deeper while Jessalyn lies beside him in a trance of wonderment, in awe that sleep comes to her husband so easily, that must be caught, as in a flimsy net, by her.

But in this bed, on his back, clamped in place, poor Whitey seems—well, smaller. Diminished. It is what the man has been fighting for all of his life—not to be run down.

His breathing has become so arduous, the strain so extreme, Jessalyn wants to crawl into the bed beside him to hold him and help him breathe, as often she holds him in the night, in their bed, as he sinks in a series of twitches and missteps into sleep; but the bed is too narrow, this would never be allowed by the hospital staff.

Oh, what is she thinking! Thoughts rattling in her head like dried seeds in a clay pot. Or—loose coins, rolls of adhesive tape, spools of thread in one of the kitchen drawers swiftly opened.

So sleepy! She sees what appears to be loose macaroni, that has fallen from a box onto a kitchen shelf… This is wrong. It is not like Jessalyn to be so careless a housekeeper.

Newspaper pages scattered on the counter. Dishes soaking in the sink, she’d been about to rinse and put into the dishwasher.

Pouring seed into the bird feeders. Exacting, trying not to spill too much, which draws squirrels. Whitey’s feud with resident squirrels—Go on! Get the hell out of here! Damn you! They’d laughed at Whitey exasperated chasing squirrels who fled scarcely a few yards before stopping, squawking at him, shaking their enormous tails like livid jeering rats. Sophia had said Oh Daddy, the squirrels are hungry, too.

Another feud of Whitey’s, Canada geese on the back lawn. Each day, more Canada geese. Nothing enraged Whitey McClaren like Canada goose droppings.

Go on! Get the hell out of here! Go back to Canada where you belong and take your crap with you.

He’d enlisted the boys to help him. Long-legged Thom, rushing at the geese with a hockey stick, laughing.

Short-legged, six years old, Virgil trailed behind.

Where will Thom stay the night? In his old room, at the house?

And Virgil—where is Virgil?

Too many McClarens to fit into the Intensive Care room. A limit of two visitors. The rest are waiting outside in the hospital corridor—(she wants to think that’s where they are).

Even in the surgical waiting area Virgil had been too restless to stay in one place. She’d seen him pacing in the corridor. Talking with one of the night nurses. Fascinated to observe Virgil (too thin, shoulders bowed as if to minimize his height, dark blond hair tied back in a ponytail, skimpy beard—how exasperated Whitey would be, to see him in this public place!—and wearing loose-fitting overalls, embroidered Indian-looking shirt Whitey would categorize as hippie, his usual chewed-looking leather sandals) speaking with a stranger, seemingly an admiring stranger, whatever could he be telling her?—as the nurse (a woman of about Virgil’s age, or a little older) blinked at him, nodding, smiling as if she’d never encountered anyone so eloquent.

Virgil’s bullshit—Thom has a way of sneering.

That is cruel. Unfair. You don’t always know what Virgil is getting at but Virgil certainly does, and Virgil takes it all very seriously.

Scrub my soul clean.

Effort of a lifetime.

Only Jessalyn knows how Virgil antagonized Whitey a few years before by suggesting that people like him should double-tithe. You can’t spend your money, Dad. You just keep re-investing it.

Of course, Virgil doesn’t know how much money the elder McClarens donate to charitable organizations each year. Virgil has no idea.

What had hurt Whitey was the tactless phrase People like you.

Jessalyn had been hurt, too. What does it even mean—People like you?

Wanting to plead even now, on Whitey’s behalf—We are not perfect people but we are living the best lives we know how to live.

And Virgil would smile his maddening-Virgil smile without needing to say But that best isn’t good enough, Mom. Sorry.

Has Whitey squeezed her hand?—Jessalyn’s heart pitches forward.

“Whitey? Oh—Whitey?”—so excited, she is feeling faint.

The handknit heather-colored sweater has fallen to the floor. The eldest daughter is gripping her shoulders to steady her.

But no, possibly Whitey has not squeezed her hand. Possibly she’d imagined it…

Mom! We’d better take you home. Now.

We’ll be back first thing in the morning…

Has something been decided? The middle daughter, the bossy one, high school principal, has taken Jessalyn firmly by the arm.

Daddy is doing really well. He looks better—his color is much better. You know Whitey—… “never say never.”

The daughters laugh together. Jessalyn hears herself join in, weakly.

“Never say never”—it is indeed an expression Whitey uses often.

Feeling so very tired, a watery sensation in her brain, knees like water, trembling with cold, Jessalyn supposes she has no choice, must give in. Abandoning Whitey to this terrible place—(if he wakes, whom will he see?—what?)—she stoops to brush her lips against his (slack, chill) cheek, dares to approach his shuddering breath.

Love you, darling! Praying for you.

How Whitey would wince, and laugh. Praying for me? Must be bad news.

In a confiding voice a nurse is urging the McClaren daughters—Take your mother home. Jarring to hear your mother spoken as if she (Jessalyn) were not even present. Is this a presage of being elderly, elderly and infirm?—gently-but-firmly “walked” along a corridor and your every movement scrutinized for if you falter, if you appear dizzy, in danger of fainting strong (i.e., younger) arms will seize you and support you; and Jessalyn McClaren is not the sort of person who causes a disruption in any quasi-public place, has always been the most courteous, the most obliging, the least assertive of persons, a lovely woman, a beloved woman, wife, mother, grandmother, trying not to feel panic at the prospect of her husband not home.

Just a single night. Unthinkable.

The Vigil

One by one they’d moved away from the house on Old Farm Road to become adults in the world beyond the McClarens.

And now, this harrowing succession of days in October 2010 when their father was hospitalized in the aftermath of a stroke, and their vigil was a flimsy shared raft on a choppy river, and their eyes did not dare lift much above the level of the river for fear that the dark, surging waters would engulf them, they found themselves returned to the house each night as if to the safety of dry land.

Yet it was strange to them, it was eerie and unsettling, the house had changed so little since they’d left, and they had changed so much.

Or, the house had not changed so much, and they had scarcely changed (inwardly, essentially) at all.

“I’LL STAY WITH MOM TONIGHT.”

“No. It’s fine. I live close by, I can stay with her.”

“I drove her to the hospital, so I’ll stay, and drive her back to the hospital in the morning. It’s just easier.”

“Why’s it easier? I should drive her tomorrow.”

“You’ll just upset her. You’re always so grabby.” Meanly, Lorene made a gesture with both hands as if tugging at a cow’s teats.

Stung, Beverly objected: “You’ll have to go to work—won’t you? They can’t function at the high school without the ‘She-Gestapo’—can they?”

Lorene cast her sister a look of sheer savagery. It must have been, Lorene knew of her She-Gestapo reputation at North Hammond High but had not known that the others knew.

“Of course I’m not going to work tomorrow. Not as long as my father is in Intensive Care!”

Eventually it was determined that, except for Beverly, who felt that she must return home to her family that night, they would all stay at the old house with their mother.

“Just in case. We’d better.”

Jessalyn was given no voice in the matter. She didn’t know whether to be touched by her adult children’s solicitude, or to feel oppressed by it. Why were they speaking of her as if she weren’t even present? Seeming to think that she shouldn’t be alone in her own house as if she were very elderly, or very unstable.

Jessalyn protested, weakly: she could drive herself to the hospital in the morning. She would meet them there. “The nurse said—seven A.M. Certainly, I will be all right tonight…”

“Mom, no. Daddy would never want you to be alone at such a time.”

None of them would listen to her. Jessalyn was forced to see how they were all taller than she was, and loomed over her. When had this happened? Even Sophia, the youngest.

In their faces, defiance. Though they were exhausted, and anxious, this opposition was thrilling to them, that they might overcome their mother’s wishes in the service of protecting her. She opened her mouth to protest but felt too tired, suddenly.

And it would be comforting, certainly—to have someone stay with her.

She would tell Whitey—The children took over. They were so protective of me. You’d have been proud of them.

Dear Whitey! He was always looking for ways to be proud of his children, and not annoyed and irritated as he was so often with Virgil.

Yes of course Virgil was with us. Every minute.

When the terrible news had come that afternoon, for several hours her brain had shut down. But now that Whitey appeared to be holding his own she was collecting things to tell him.

It was a cheering phrase, especially out of the mouths of the Intensive Care nurses who, presumably, knew what they were saying.

Holding his own. You had an image of Whitey gripping something tightly, a rope perhaps, a rudder. Holding himself steady even as the floor shifted beneath him.

He would want to know—everything! How he’d been discovered in his car on a shoulder of the Hennicott Expressway, or (possibly) he had tried to get out of the car, and collapsed and fallen onto the pavement. How Hammond police officers had discovered him—unconscious. How they’d called 911 and an ambulance had come (within four minutes, it was claimed) and brought him to the very best emergency medical facility within one hundred miles.

Saving up things to tell Whitey. Nearly forty years.

Mostly these were things about which no one else would care in the slightest. Every small, inconsequential, fascinating tidbit to tell her husband who, like most men, pretended to disapprove of gossip but relished it. As he saved up things to tell her.

Darling, I was so lonely! But I could hear your voice—I could hear our children’s voices—though I could not answer you—and I could not see you…

She had faith, her husband would tell her where he’d been. As soon as he was returned to her.

“I’LL TAKE YOU UP to bed, Mom. Come on!”

As soon as they were at the house. Switching on the kitchen lights.

Beverly reached for Jessalyn’s hand, and would not release it, though Jessalyn protested, “Don’t be silly, Beverly. I can ‘take’ myself to bed, thank you.”

“You’re exhausted. You should see yourself—your face is white as wax.”

Beverly insisted. For she was going home, soon. But Lorene insisted, also. And Sophia could not bear to be left behind.

Six of them, entering the kitchen. So many McClarens, you’d expect a festive occasion.

Jessalyn continued to protest faintly as the sisters accompanied her upstairs. Their voices lifted like the cries of birds, lightly chiding, melodic. In the kitchen Thom and Virgil were left behind with each other.

They resented their sisters, perhaps. Not entirely consciously but—it was so, in a time of crisis, in a time of emotions, in a time when (physical) comfort was required, daughters took precedence over sons.

“Want one of Dad’s beers? Ale?”—Thom opened the refrigerator and took out two bottles of dark brown ale. Virgil shrugged—No.

“Oh, I forgot. You ‘don’t drink.’”

Stiffly Virgil said, “Yes. I do. Sometimes. But not now.”

It was awkward for the McClaren brothers to be alone together.

Neither could have said when they’d last been alone together in this house or anywhere.

Rare for them to think of themselves as brothers.

In their parents’ house, in the kitchen, it was impossible not to expect to hear their father’s voice. Whitey would have been surprised and pleased to see them if (possibly) somewhat mystified, at this hour.

Jesus! What the hell are you two doing here? Sit down, let me get you something to drink…

But Whitey was shrewd enough to know that his sons, who had so little in common, would hardly be together in his kitchen at this hour of the night unless something in the family had gone terribly wrong.

Thom was drinking ale, out of the bottle. Whitey’s German ale, so bitter Thom winced as it went down. He’d found an opened jar of cashews in the cupboard.

Virgil was drinking orange juice, he’d found a carton in the refrigerator.

The silence between them was strained. Yet neither wanted to speak of their father, just yet.

Seven and a half years separated them. For Virgil, a lifetime.

If Virgil shut his eyes he could make out the shadowy, elusive figure of his elder brother Thom always in silhouette, his back to Virgil and moving away.

He’d adored his big brother, as a child. But no longer.

Now, Virgil was wary of Thom. He understood those sidelong glances, scowled greetings and mock-friendly remarks—How’s it going, Virg?

Virg wasn’t a name, wasn’t a diminutive, only just an ugly sound.

Thom had grown distant to Virgil, living now in Rochester. Virgil scarcely knew his brother’s wife and children—(two young children? three?). Casually it was said that Thom was Whitey’s “heir”—obviously, Thom would be Whitey’s successor in the family business.

(Whitey had never tried to hire Virgil to work for him. Well maybe, a long time ago, when Virgil was in high school, and Whitey had asked if he’d like to help out writing advertising copy since, it seemed, judging from published work of Virgil’s he’d seen in a student literary magazine, Virgil “had a way with words.” Fifteen, Virgil had stared at his father with a wounded look murmuring No thank you! as if Whitey had asked him to commit an outrage.)

Just a glance at Thom McClaren, tall and rangy-limbed, sandy-haired, handsome face now just perceptibly beginning to thicken, in his late thirties—(Virgil often stared, when [he believed] Thom wasn’t aware of him)—you could see that Thom was one of those persons who feels very good about himself, and his self-estimate is (largely) shared by those who gaze upon him.

So Virgil thought. A sliver of envy pierced his heart.

“HAVE SOME. I don’t want to eat these all alone”—Thom pushed the jar of cashews in Virgil’s direction.

Cashews were Whitey’s weakness. The children had laughed at their father insisting their mother hide nuts, cookies, chocolates in the kitchen in places where he couldn’t easily find them.

But when Whitey ate a handful of nuts, he’d begin coughing. That was a giveaway, Daddy’d been eating nuts…

Half-consciously the brothers were observing that something was wrong in the kitchen. Their mother was so fastidious a housekeeper, you’d never expect to find newspaper pages scattered on a counter, or dishes soaking in a sink. Especially since her children were gone and the cheerful disorder of those years was only a memory.

Thom recalled when he’d been a boy in the household and one of his duties was to sweep the kitchen floor after dinner, each night.

Another duty, to drag out the trash containers early Friday mornings.

For these tasks and a few others, Whitey had paid him ten dollars a week. But Jessalyn had always given him a little more—“Just in case you need it, Tommy.”

They’d grown up in a well-to-do household. No disguising the fact that the McClarens had money—you didn’t live in one of the beautiful old houses on Old Farm Road if you didn’t have money. Yet none of the McClaren children had felt what’s called entitled.

At least, Thom didn’t think so. Not him.

All this while, with the maddening care of one trying not to draw attention to himself, Virgil was collecting the scattered newspaper pages which he shuffled together and stuffed in the paper-recycling bin, without so much as glancing at a headline. Thom recalled with scorn how, in Virgil’s Oberlin days, and after, his hippie brother had evinced a visceral horror of what he might discover in the newspaper by accident—he’d thought it “obscene” to look upon the suffering of strangers in photographs.

Too restless to sit still Virgil rinsed the dishes in scalding-hot water and placed them in the dishwasher one by one with such exaggerated care, Thom’s patience was tested.

“Sit still! For Christ’s sake.”

Thom resented it, as his sisters did, that Virgil seemed to have become closer to their mother than any of them, in recent years. Because Virgil lived nearby, came often to the house (on his damned bicycle) when Whitey was away, probably more often than Thom and his sisters knew.

Not asking for money from Jessalyn, probably, because that wasn’t Virgil’s way, but surely accepting money from her, for that was certainly Jessalyn’s way.

D’you think Dad knows?—Beverly would ask; and Thom would say, Well. We can’t ask him.

In the darkened window above the sink Virgil saw his own, dark reflection. And beyond his shoulder his handsome, elder brother sprawled in a chair, drinking from a bottle.

The wonder of an older brother, to a younger. The adolescent male body, utterly fascinating, captivating, to the younger brother, knowing himself inadequate in every way.

Glimpsing Thom part-clothed, or naked—how Virgil had stared.

Swallowing hard. Even now. His brother’s supple, lean-muscled body. His brother’s careless grace. Wiry hairs growing in his brother’s armpits, on his chest, legs. At his groin.

His brother’s penis.

The very word, forbidden to murmur aloud even in privacy—penis.

And other, similar forbidden words, cock, dick, balls—Virgil trembled to recall the spell such words had upon him, for years.

A lifetime. If you are the younger.

As if he sensed Virgil’s thoughts Thom dared to rummage in a coat pocket for—what? A pack of cigarettes.

Dared to light a cigarette!

“Hey. C’mon. Mom will smell the smoke in the morning.”

“I’ll air out the kitchen.”

“They’ll smell it upstairs right now. Come on, Thom!”

“I said, I’ll air out the kitchen.”

“Well.” Virgil registered his displeasure with a shift of his shoulders.

“Well, I will.”

It wasn’t like Virgil to provoke his brother. He’d had too many unpleasant consequences in the past. The lateness of the hour was a kind of unraveling.

Thom said, exhaling smoke: “Dad smokes. He still does.”

“Dad does?”

“Nobody’s supposed to know. Especially Mom. Not as much as he used to, but at least once a day. In his office. I’ve seen the ashes.” Thom paused, for there was a kind of luxuriant satisfaction in knowing something about their father that Virgil didn’t know. If Virgil made a prissy remark about Whitey smoking, with his high blood pressure, and having had a stroke, Thom planned to spring up from his chair and smack him on the side of the head.

But Virgil was wary, and kept his distance. Chewed his lower lip in silence, preoccupied with arranging sponges on the rim of the sink.

Their mother had two (synthetic) sponges for kitchen work: one for rinsing dishes, the other for wiping counters. The former was always kept on the left, the latter on the right. Over a period of a week or two, the counter sponge was discarded, as used-up; the left-hand sponge was moved to the right, and a fresh new sponge removed from its cellophane wrapper.

Tonight, the left-hand sponge was bright yellow; the right-hand, purple. Virgil took care not to mix them up.

In Virgil’s household which was, to a degree, a communal household, in which no one took particular responsibility for keeping things clean, one large (natural) sponge sufficed for long periods of time. Eventually the sponge was discarded because it began to shred, not because it had become singularly ugly and filthy.

How dismayed Jessalyn would be, to see the way Virgil lived. It was his responsibility to shield her.

Once Sophia had dropped by the ramshackle old farmhouse, and happened to see the sponge in Virgil’s sink, which she hadn’t identified immediately as a sponge. “God! That looks like liver cirrhosis,” she’d said. “But I suppose it must be something else.”

They’d laughed together but Virgil had understood his scientist-sister’s dismay. Disgust.

But life is teeming with pathogens we can’t see, Virgil thought. Surrounding us. Inside and out.

“Of course, he’s trying to quit. That’s why he’s gained that weight in his gut, he needs to work off.”

Thom was still talking about their father. Their father’s surreptitious smoking. To which Thom was privy, and Virgil was not.

It was giving Thom a coarse sort of pleasure to know that he was making his brother jealous (a little, at least) and making him uncomfortable (secondary smoke inhalation—Virgil was trying not to cough). Boastfully Thom said, “Dad confides in me. I give him good advice—get back into the gym and just quit. Lots of guys his age and older work out and some of them are pretty impressive.” Thom laughed as if what he was saying was true, or true in some way. He liked it that Virgil would be imagining him and their father conferring together so intimately, and not just on matters of business.

“But don’t tell Mom. About Dad smoking, I mean.”

Virgil wanted to retort, if anyone should tell her it’s you. Certainly Dad’s doctors would want to know.

Insane to be thinking about smoking. Anyone in their father’s condition. Was Thom smiling?

Virgil’s heart was hurting. He’d been made to think of their father in Intensive Care, his breathing done for him by a respirator. And maybe Whitey would never breathe again on his own.

He could not bear it, if his father died. Without having loved him.

Without having said, just once—Virgil, I am proud of you. For being the person you are and knowing it isn’t what we do but what we are.

Not what people say about us but what we say of ourselves.

Whitey hadn’t touched Virgil in—how long?—could not even guess. Laying his hand on Thom’s shoulder, greeting Thom with a pumping handshake, that lit-up look in his face—so different from the way he greeted Virgil.

No handshake. (But that was all right: Virgil wasn’t one to shake hands. Silly social custom springing from primitive masculine anxiety.)

No hugs. (The way Whitey hugged his daughters!)

Regarding Virgil, Whitey’s characteristic manner was stiffness, apprehension; a wary smile, narrowed eyes. What will this son of mine do to embarrass me next.

Some feelings, you can’t hide. Though a parent should try harder than Whitey did.

On the cork bulletin board in a corner of the kitchen was a display of snapshots and cards. Years, decades. Overlapping newspaper clippings, school programs, class photos. Jessalyn was always adding new things but was reluctant to take anything away. A glossy photo of Hammond mayor John Earle McClaren shaking hands with the governor of New York State and both men stiffly posed smiling into the camera. In 1993 their father had looked so ruddy and so young, it was painful to see.

Virgil disliked the family bulletin board. Too many snapshots of his big jock-brother Thom who’d been a high school athlete. And too many pictures of Beverly glamorous as a face on a billboard.

Family pictures, he didn’t mind so much. Even weddings, newborn babies. The McClaren family together with arms linked smiling at the camera in a backyard, on a beach. Somewhere.

The earliest photos of Virgil were of a beautiful little child with pale blond hair, luminous blue eyes. Virgil had seen to it that these had been removed from the bulletin board, years ago.

In high school Virgil had started hiding pictures of himself beneath others’ pictures, or removing them entirely. Excepting one of Virgil at about age ten, clutching his mother’s hand with a look of stricken adoration.

His young self, Virgil didn’t consider exactly him. All children are innocent of vanity and even homely children are beautiful. That begins to change by about age thirteen.

Embarrassed, Virgil saw that his mother had tacked up several newspaper photographs of scrap-metal sculptures of his, exhibited at a recent arts fair. Virgil hadn’t even known that these pictures had been published in the Hammond weekly paper; he scarcely remembered the sculptures, which had all been sold at the fair.

(What’s the secret of selling all your work? Virgil was asked. The answer was, Just keep lowering prices.)

(Was Virgil touched to see these pictures on the bulletin board in his mother’s kitchen? He had not the heart to remove them.)

“Some great things there, that Mom has saved. My kids can’t believe how young we all were, once.”

Thom spoke lightly, as if relenting. Seeing that Virgil was looking at the bulletin board and wanting to be nice to Virgil, for once.

Thom continued: “I’ve got a corkboard in our kitchen, too. Not as big as this. It’s a great idea, I think. For the kids especially. So much gets forgotten otherwise.” He paused, considering. “I guess you’ve seen it? Or no, maybe not.”

No. Virgil had not seen the damned corkboard in Thom’s house in Rochester. He had not ever visited Thom’s house in Rochester.

Thom opened another bottle of dark German ale. He’d finished most of the cashews. Christ! The interior of his mouth stung with salt.

It was too quiet. Where the hell were the sisters?

Thom resented them running off with their mother and leaving him with Virgil when they knew how Thom felt about Virgil.

But it wouldn’t seem right for Thom to have gone upstairs. It was a matter for the sisters—putting their dazed mother to bed. Not for him. And Virgil would probably follow him like a stray dog.

“It’s good, maybe.”

“What’s good?”

Virgil had spoken so belatedly, Thom had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

“Forgetting.”

“‘Forgetting’—what?”

In the bright kitchen lights the brothers’ faces were too clearly delineated. Like high-definition TV, you’re forced to see more than you care to see.

Virgil lowered his eyes, shyly. Yet there was stubbornness in every action of Virgil’s, even the self-effacing. Thom knew, and lay in wait.

“Guess we should go to bed. There’s only a few hours to sleep before we need to get up.”

Waiting for Virgil to say something, for Virgil had become very quiet since examining the bulletin board.

“I haven’t slept in this house since—Jesus, I don’t know when.” Thom tried to think. Last semester of college? Last summer, after graduation? His old room had been dismantled years ago, for other purposes. “What about you, Virgil?”

Virgil seemed startled. Lost in his own thoughts.

“I guess—I don’t need much sleep.”

“Don’t you!”—Thom sneered.

God knew, he was making an effort with Virgil. He was almost forty years old—not a kid any longer. Father of an eleven-year-old. His siblings who’d never had children (Lorene, Sophia, Virgil) had no idea how rapidly time passed when there were children in your life, to measure yourself against.

It was true, Thom disapproved of Virgil’s lifestyle. (Like Whitey, he had no idea what Virgil’s lifestyle might be; like Whitey, he did not wish to know.) However, he owed it to their parents to try to get along with Virgil.

Still, it maddened him to see Virgil’s wispy beard, scruffy dirty-blond hair tied back in a ponytail with a length of twine. A slight stoop of Virgil’s shoulders though he was only thirty-one. Slovenly embroidered shirt, frayed and paint-stained overalls, open-toed sandals. (And Virgil’s toes were knobby and unsightly.) What roused Thom to particular indignation was that look in Virgil’s warm blue eyes of infinite compassion, understanding, sympathy—a swimmingness of feeling.

Looking in those eyes, you were in danger of drowning.

Sometimes, Thom said to Beverly, with whom he shared family pre-occupations, Virgil makes me want to punch him in the mouth. Except he’d just forgive me, and then I’d want to kill him.

Beverly had laughed, though she’d been shocked. She liked to hear such terrible things from her revered elder brother but she would not have wished to share her own feelings about Virgil for she knew that such feelings sprang from what was meanest in her, and furthest from the family love and loyalty their parents had tried to instill in them.

But Beverly had laughed, feeling as if Thom had tickled her.

Who’s he think he is, the Dalai Lama?—Beverly had said wittily.

At last, footsteps on the stairs. But it was only one sister—Beverly.

Disappointing, Beverly was going home. Lorene and Sophia had gone to bed upstairs in their old rooms.

No, Beverly didn’t want a drink. Thanks but no.

Thom saw, his sister was looking disheveled, fattish. Not much like the radiant high school girl in the snapshots. And shiny-eyed, teary. (Had she been crying? Christ!) Refused a bottle from the refrigerator but she did take a swig from Thom’s and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand as a man might have done.

“We put Mom to bed, finally. She wouldn’t remove all her clothes, she says she’s afraid of the phone ringing and we’ll have to drive to the hospital and she wants to be prepared. It’s so strange—she speaks so calmly. It’s like Dad is instructing her—you know, how Dad is always telling her what to do. And how weird it is, to be in that bedroom, and know that Dad isn’t there. We stayed with her a while until it seemed that she was asleep (unless she was just pretending, to get rid of us) and we crept out and shut the door and I’m going home now, I am absolutely wrung dry.”

“Why don’t you stay here, too? It’s late to drive home.”

“No, I just called Steve. They’re waiting for me. I need to get home. I’ll stay tomorrow night if—if Dad is still in danger…”

Beverly was looking frightened, haggard. Still in danger had scared her.

Abruptly Thom unwound his long legs from his chair, rose and hugged Beverly with a muffled sob. Beverly grabbed him tight.

“Hey, c’mon. Dad will be just fine. You know Whitey McClaren—he’ll outlive us all.”

Looking on Virgil stood uncertainly a few feet away as if waiting for Beverly to detach herself from Thom and next hug him.

But Beverly only just said, to both brothers, at the door—“Good night!”

“YOU ARE ONLY AS HAPPY as your least happy child.”

(Someone had said this. Or had she heard it on TV.)

(Was it a silly platitude? Was it true? Painfully true?)

Whitey didn’t think of it that way. Not Whitey!

“It’s more like we give them life, we set them free, like little boats on a river. We prepare them for the journey but once they’re twenty-one, let’s say, it’s up to them to make the journey by themselves. And our children are long past twenty-one.”

Whitey spoke so sensibly, she knew he must be correct.

Yet, she did not agree. She had to object.

Not an hour passed but that Jessalyn didn’t think of each of her children. It did not matter that they were “grown up”—“adults.” In some ways this made them more vulnerable. As they’d spun out in ever larger concentric circles from her.

Like bases on a baseball field. First base: Thom. Second base: Beverly. Third base: Lorene.

(In her imagination, still children. But Thom lanky-long-legged, a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead so you couldn’t see his eyes.)

But there the metaphor broke down. For there was Virgil, and there was Sophia. The babies! Their mother had spent fewer years thinking about them for the simple reason that they’d been in her life for fewer years. It was eerie how, in a dream, though there were children, there were not enough children for she’d forgotten one or two, or, worse yet, they had not been born.

This was an unspeakable horror to her. As it was senseless, ridiculous.

How Whitey would laugh at her, if he knew! How the children would laugh.

And Virgil would quote some ancient Greek curmudgeon-philosopher about how it is better not to have been born at all—ridiculous!

“Maybe a mother feels differently. I do feel that they are my responsibility and always will be, if I am their mother.”

“Well, darling—that’s silly. That’s you.”

Whitey kissed her lips, that felt slightly cold. His own lips always felt (to him) slightly over-warm.

Adding: “I hope you don’t think that I am your responsibility, too.”

Jessalyn drew away from her husband, just slightly stung.

“Of course! Of course I feel that you are my responsibility, darling. ‘In sickness and in health.’ Any wife would feel that way about her husband.”

“Not any wife, dear. But you’re very sweet to say so.”

They were sitting close together, hands clasped together.

Jessalyn thought, with a kind of wild elation—But I will have to outlive him, to care for him. I cannot ever leave him even to die.

AND NOW. In the bed, alone. Her side of the bed.

How strange it is, in this bed, alone: without Whitey beside her.

Exhausted and dazed, seemingly wide-awake, and her eyes wide-open (though in fact her eyes are closed) sinking into a dark perilous place—fearful of what she will see there.

Nothing. There is—nothing.

Gusts of wind, against the darkened windows. Skeins of rain slapping against the glass and a sound of wind chimes almost inaudible, she strains to hear, faint and fading, silvery, the most frail beauty. She strains to hear.

“Heir”

Of the McClaren family it was only Thom who knew.

Without being certain what it was, he knew.

Mistaken identity. All charges dropped.

It was all very upsetting. Confusing. His father had evidently been “arrested”—or rather, his father had been “taken into police custody”—for having allegedly “interfered” with a police arrest at the side of the Hennicott Expressway.

But then, his father had “collapsed”—not inside the Toyota Highlander but at the side of the Expressway—and police officers had called 911.

Somehow, there had been a “mistake” in “identifying”—someone. (Whitey McClaren?) A mistake by—whom?

Thom was being assured, all charges had been dropped.

In the light of a “further investigation”—“substantiating by ‘witnesses’”—all charges had been dropped.

All this, or as much of this as he could absorb, Thom was informed on his cell phone, in a corridor outside his father’s room in the Intensive Care Unit at Hammond General Hospital. Cell phone reception inside the hospital was poor, the voice at the other end was continually breaking up. Hello? Hello?—Thom cried in exasperation.

The call was from a Hammond police lieutenant who’d seemed to be acquainted with Whitey McClaren, or at least to know who Whitey was, and may have known Thom McClaren, also. (Had they gone to high school together? Middle school? The lieutenant’s name had a vague teasing familiar sound.) In a conciliatory voice the lieutenant informed Thom that his father’s 2010 Toyota Highlander had been towed from the Expressway to the police auto pound and that Thom could pick it up the next day. In his distracted state Thom had not thought to demand What the hell did you do to my father but only rather to stammer a question or two about the procedure of picking up the vehicle for he knew that Whitey would be anxious about the Highlander, where it had been taken and who had been driving it.

Thom would need to come to police headquarters first, to pick up authorization papers. He would need his ID.

Confused, Thom had thanked the lieutenant who expressed the hope that his father was “doing OK” at the hospital.

“Yes, thanks. I guess—he is.”

But after the connection was broken Thom stood in the hospital corridor as others passed around him, white-clad medical workers, attendants pushing gurneys, or laundry carts, visitors like himself in ordinary street clothes, looking pained, lost. Trying to hear again those words whose significance had eluded him—Mistaken identity, charges dropped.

“DAD’S CAR. WHERE IS IT?”

“At the police auto impound. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

“They towed it away?”

Lorene was urgent, anxious. Her interrogatory manner was grating to Thom.

“Of course. They wouldn’t leave it at the side of the Expressway.”

“How badly is it damaged? Did they say?”

“My impression is, just minor damage. I think I’ll be able to drive it home.”

“If you want me to drive you there, or drive with you and bring your car back…”

But no, Thom would take a taxi. He insisted. He didn’t want to involve anyone else. The impound lot was in a derelict neighborhood south of the Expressway and he could go there directly from the hospital, next morning.

Thinking how it was like Lorene to posit her offer in a subjunctive mode—If you want me… So that the onus was on Thom, to say yes, or to decline.

Not that Lorene wasn’t generous, in the time of a family emergency. Not that Lorene did not care. But there was the (subtly reproachful) assumption on her part that Thom, as the eldest, was responsible for their father’s vehicle, as the others were not.

Since you’re Dad’s favorite. Dad’s “heir.” These accusatory words were not uttered aloud.

How differently Beverly reacted when she learned about the Toyota—immediately she’d offered to drive with Thom, in his car or in hers, so that he could drive their father’s car back home. “You can’t go alone, Tommy. What if, in that neighborhood…”

Laying her hand on his arm, pleading.

Tommy was a kind of claim. Their old, easy intimacy, eldest sister and elder brother.

But Thom preferred to go alone. He did not want to take this brief trip with either of his (older) sisters. In this family crisis he’d have enough of them.

Nor would Thom tell the others what he’d been told on the phone. Certainly, he would not tell Jessalyn. Mistaken identity. Charges dropped.

Collapsed.

“WHO? WHAT NAME? ‘MCCLAREN’—THAT’S YOU?”

Finally, the authorization papers were found. Payment of sixty-five dollars required.

Leaving the scene of an accident. Abandoning vehicle in no parking zone. Keys in ignition.

These had been checked. But the checks had been crossed out and initialed. What was this? At the bottom of the form, an unintelligible scrawl of a signature.

Ordinarily Thom would have demanded to know before he paid a fee or a fine but now, a taxi waiting outside, and Whitey in critical condition in the hospital, he hadn’t the heart to protest.

He did ask to speak with the lieutenant who’d called him. But he didn’t remember the lieutenant’s name—Calder, Coulter. Impassive and unhelpful as a (leaden) toad in a garden, the desk sergeant could offer no assistance.

At the hospital that morning Whitey was showing signs of coming into consciousness. His eyelids fluttered, his left eye appeared to be in focus. His bruised lips moved, soundlessly.

The fingers of his left hand. But not his right.

Toes of his left feet. But not his right.

“Whitey? Oh, Whitey! We’re right here…”

Jessalyn, tireless. Caressing Whitey’s hands which were cold, stiff.

She’d slept a few hours, she’d said. She’d had time to dress carefully, brushing her hair. Makeup, lipstick. For Whitey.

Wearing a strand of pearls Whitey had given her for one of their anniversaries, his favorite of his many gifts to her. On her ears, matching pearls.

Happiness in her eyes. Seeing that Whitey seemed to be reviving.

Thom wanted to caution his mother—Don’t expect too much.

Their parents’ love for each other had been so strong, you felt it as excluding you. Even Thom, the eldest, had not escaped this curious sort of jealousy.

The prognosis for Whitey was good. You did not want to inquire too closely what good might mean, post-stroke.

He’d paid the fee. The fine. Whatever the hell it was. And at the impound a heavyset individual who appeared to be in charge wasn’t very friendly, frowning suspiciously at the authorization paper, and at Thom McClaren’s driver’s license.

“You’re thinking that I’m here to steal a car? My father’s car? And why’d I do that? How’d I even know the car was here, if my father had not told me?” Thom was furious, suddenly.

The strain of the vigil. How many hours. He hadn’t slept well the night before. He was one who required hours of sleep, steady, consoling. He could not bear his life, if he could not sleep. His father’s stroke was a devastation. He saw that the heavyset man was staring at him and he realized—he was like an animal that has been weakened, injured. Other animals sense its infirmity and will turn against it.

“OK, sorry. I guess—you have to be careful. I’ll find it.”

Surprising, a large number of the impounded vehicles were new models and in good condition. You had to wonder what had happened, that these vehicles had ended up impounded. Some of them looked as if they’d been in the lot a long time.

Automobile graveyard. Had to figure, some of the owners of these were no longer living.

Trouble was, Whitey’s Toyota Highlander was that obscure earthy-brown-gray, a neutral hue that fitted in with its surroundings like camouflage. Mid-sized SUVs common as sedans, or nearly. Expensive vehicles, hundreds of thousands of dollars here in the Hammond police impound lot.

Finally, Thom located his father’s vehicle in a farther corner of the lot. License plates matched.

Examined it outside and in. Not so clean and shining as Whitey’s vehicles usually were but no evident dents or scrapes in the chassis. No cracks in the windshield.

“That’s strange…”

He’d been told—at least, he thought he’d been told—that the vehicle had been in an accident on the Expressway. The air bags had detonated and injured his father and yet—it didn’t look as if the air bags had detonated.

He asked if any “repairs” had been made to the Highlander and was told no.

Hardly likely, that Hammond police had “repaired” his father’s car.

Later, at home, at the house on Old Farm Road where he would be staying another night at least, he called Hammond police headquarters another time and asked to speak to Lieutenant—was it Calder, Coulter?—Coleman?—(could’ve kicked himself, he had not heard the name clearly, and had been too distracted at the time to ask).

No one there by that name.

“Well, is there a lieutenant in the Hammond Police Department with a name similar to that?” he asked, trying to be patient. Courteous. “This is about an incident on the Hennicott Expressway on October 18, ‘mistaken identity’—‘charges dropped’—‘John Earle McClaren of 99 Old Farm Road, North Hammond’—”

Put on hold. Waited.

The Seed

In the twilight before dawn, the first, tentative cries of birds.

Ghostly-white birch trees emerging out of mist.

Sloping hills of their neighbors’ property, where horses grazed.

Each McClaren child had a particular room, a window, a singular view from a window, that meant home.

IN A FAMILY OF FIVE CHILDREN, one is invariably the baby.

One is the eldest, with nearly the status of an adult.

It is like a footrace: the eldest is first, then the next-born, then the next-, and the next. And the last.

And each of them thinking, staring out a window—Why, this is home! I’ve never left.

TRUE THAT THE MCCLAREN CHILDREN LEFT home in a timely fashion but the fact is, none of them went far.

Of the five only Thom was living in a city other than Hammond; and Thom lived (with his wife and children) in Rochester, seventy miles away. As head of the textbook division of McClaren, Inc. he was in constant communication with his father.

Beverly, Lorene, Sophia—the McClaren daughters—lived within a radius of eight miles of the family home.

Virgil had traveled the farthest—as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska—as far south as Las Cruces, New Mexico. In his twenties he’d disappeared for weeks, months at a time without letting anyone know where he was except belatedly, when they received postcards indicating he’d already moved on. He liked, as he said, to drift—“Like cottonwood seed.”

So vain, he was without vanity. As an infant is without vanity, enthralled by its own mere being.

“A seed is meant to take root and grow. It’s meant to turn into something larger and more significant than a damned seed.”

To mitigate the exasperation of his words Whitey laughed, or tried to; and Virgil said, frowning, “But what do you mean by ‘mean,’ Dad? Why would you assume that anything in nature exists for any purpose other than itself?”

“Why would I assume—what?”

“Well, Dad, see—that’s your fallacy. In this case.”

FALLACY. A RISKY WORD TO TOSS CASUALLY AT WHITEY MCCLAREN.

The others listened, keenly. Even Sophia who was usually Virgil’s ally was hoping that their father would rebuke her annoying brother.

It did not go unnoticed among the McClaren siblings that Virgil was never (seemingly) hurt by their father’s remarks. Virgil was apt to smile his small stoic smile, and stroke his wispy beard; sometimes he laughed, a wincing sort of laugh, of the kind a household pet might laugh when, not meaning to hurt, someone stepped on his tail.

“It is not a ‘fallacy’ to believe that we are here on earth to be of use. That’s just common sense!”—Whitey had begun to speak impatiently. His face had begun to tighten and to flush. Like most public men whose social manner is unfailingly genial and good-natured, whose seduction of an audience is achieved through frankness and directness, or the appearance of these, he could not easily bear opposition.

“But what does it mean—‘of use’? What kind of use, for whose use, at what price to the user, and to what purpose? There is utility, and there is ‘uselessness’—that’s to say, art.” With naive urgency Virgil spoke, leaning forward on his skinny elbows and seemingly unaware of his father’s mounting irritation.

“Art is useless?”

“Well. Lots of things that are useless are not ‘art’—but yes, ‘art’ is not a useful thing. If it was, it wouldn’t be ‘art.’”

“Bullshit! Plenty of useful things can be beautiful if they are beautifully designed. Buildings, bridges, cars—airplanes, rockets—glassware, vases”—Whitey spoke excitedly, stammering—“and I’d include our books, the books we design and print, they are first-rate products, they are useful and they are art.”

Virgil said: “Beauty is not ‘art’—not necessarily. Beauty and art are two different things, and usefulness and ‘art’ are two different things…”

“I said—bullshit! You don’t know what the hell you are talking about, you’ve never worked. How can you have the slightest idea of what life is, what ‘usefulness’ is, if you’ve never worked at a real job?”

Jessalyn intervened, gently: “Now, Whitey. You know that Virgil has had a number of jobs. He has had—”

“—part-time jobs. ‘Helping out.’ ‘House-sitting.’ ‘Dog-walking.’ But nothing permanent, or real.”

This was unfair! And inaccurate! Virgil drew breath to object but a warning glance from his mother quieted him, as surely as if she’d laid a restraining hand on his arm.

How frustrating to Whitey, he could not—quite—win any argument with his wily youngest child though he knew, indeed everyone knew, that he was in the right. Whitey had only himself to blame (he conceded) for agreeing to name his younger son after some airy notion of Jessalyn’s and not some more traditional name: Matthew, for instance.

Not likely, Whitey thought, that he’d have such frustrating exchanges with a son named Matthew, as he never had with a son named Thom.

HE’D ALWAYS BEEN A DREAMY CHILD. A lonely child. A stubborn child. In school, evasive. Among children his age, elusive. Among his older siblings, a baby.

At the age of eleven Virgil fell under the spell of William Blake whose poetry he discovered by chance in one of his mother’s old college anthologies crammed into a bookcase.

Oh! Virgil felt something like a current touch him, coursing through his body and leaving him weak.

His mother’s handwritten annotations on the page had intrigued Virgil, also. He had not ever considered his mother as a girl, a student, leaning over a book, taking notes in a classroom and pondering this very poem.

That dreaminess in Virgil, you could see it in Jessalyn too, when she believed that no one was observing her.

It had been Jessalyn who’d suggested the name “Virgil”—(had she had a high school teacher with that name? a handsome young man, a lover of poetry?)—and Whitey had not objected, for Jessalyn so rarely evinced wishes of her own.

(Whitey had regretted the name afterward. Half-seriously he’d thought that maybe Virgil’s troubles had begun with “that name.”)

WHEN AT THE AGE OF ELEVEN Virgil asked Jessalyn about William Blake she’d seemed at first not even to know who “William Blake” was—all that, the world of poetry and books, had been long ago. She’d had only a vague memory of “Auguries of Innocence,” and Songs of Innocence and Experience. When Virgil showed her The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume 2 she’d seemed baffled by the very book which she doubted was hers until Virgil showed her the name inside the front cover—Jessalyn Hannah Sewell.

Wistfully she’d said, “Well, yes—I do remember now. I remember something.”

Soon then, Virgil discovered the intoxicating poetry of Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rimbaud, Baudelaire. His first attempts at writing were imitations of these poets, as his first attempts at art were imitations of Matisse, Kandinsky, Picasso (color plates in European Art Masters, another book he’d discovered at home). The precocious boy read, or tried to read, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Great Dialogues of Plato. He gave up soon with The Aeneid, by his namesake Virgil.

He acquired a battered old upright piano and insisted upon teaching himself. From a relative he acquired a battered flute.

He composed music, to accompany his poetry. He considered his art a “visual” form of music.

It was exhilarating to think of himself as mythic, oracular. If he had to think of himself as “Virgil McClaren” he felt trapped and suffocated. The meaning of life wasn’t a narrow personal identity but an impersonal, higher self. The great aim of his life was to scrub his soul clean. His poetry and his artworks he began to sign without a last name, just Virgil (March 2005), Virgil (Sept. 2007), etc.

After he’d dropped out of Oberlin, and after he’d drifted about the country for a year or two, Virgil returned to North Hammond to live in a rented farmhouse with a shifting contingent of other, self-styled artists and activists of diverse ages. (Was this a hippie commune?—Jessalyn wondered uneasily.) Their ideal, Virgil said, was to live “morally blameless” lives without exploiting other people, or animals, or the environment, acquiring what they could of food and services through “barter” and not currency; it was rumored that they made nighttime raids on supermarket Dumpsters and local landfills. Once, Virgil had brought back a scarcely battered Formica-topped kitchen table with four matching chairs, that turned out to have been discarded from his sister Beverly’s household. (Beverly was incensed that her brother was turning into a “scavenger” but Virgil hadn’t been embarrassed in the slightest.)

Virgil’s little sculptures made of paper, scrap metal, twisted pieces of wire, rope, twine, tinsel were displayed on the front veranda of the farmhouse. By degrees he acquired a reputation at local arts and crafts fairs where Virgil works sold well for they were priced very reasonably, or for “barter.” Occasionally, Virgil won an award (though no money was likely to be involved). The local community college hired him to teach art—an actual, paying job—(and if he’d persevered, the possibility of a permanent hire, with benefits)—but after two semesters Virgil decided to quit, on the principle that (1) he was (probably) taking work from another artist, who needed the job more than he did, (2) he preferred free, open days, with no stifling restrictions, and (3) he preferred a yearly income so low, he didn’t have to pay taxes.

Jessalyn had been delighted when Virgil accepted the teaching job, and dismayed when he’d quit. “Jesus! When will he be able to support himself,” Whitey fretted.

“Darling, I think Virgil does support himself, to a degree. With his artwork.”

“His artwork! It’s junk—literally. Not marble, or aluminum, or steel, or”—Whitey’s voice trailed off, uncertainly—“alabaster. Scrap-metal. What can that be worth?”

“Art isn’t a matter of material, I think. It’s what the artist does with the material.” Jessalyn tried to speak enthusiastically. “For instance, Picasso…”

“Picasso! Are you serious! Picasso would not be living in North Hammond, New York.”

“Well—Virgil is also influenced, he says, by that hermit-sculptor who made little boxes—Joseph Cornell? And there are other examples of what Virgil calls ‘outsider art’—where the artists don’t show their work in galleries.”

“‘Galleries’—what a joke! Virgil is lucky he can show his work at the local mall, or at a 4-H fair with the cows and hogs. I guess that’s what ‘outsider art’ is—not picky.”

“He’s exhibited his work at the library downtown, and at the college. You know that.”

“Well, yes—I guess that’s an achievement: an exhibit indoors and not out in the rain.” Whitey was fuming, reveling in his very unfairness.

“Have you ever even looked at his sculptures, Whitey? The five-foot rooster he gave us, in my garden—it’s funny but really quite beautiful. And ingenious, the way he coated actual feathers with some kind of preservative, and—”

“Our son has no insurance! No benefits! He’s ‘living off the land’—like a pauper.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. We can take care of him if it’s ever necessary. He knows he can depend upon us.”

Jessalyn spoke with more confidence than she felt. Whitey flared up in anger.

“He knows? And how does he know? Is that what you tell him?”

“Of course not. Virgil never asks for money—for himself. In fact, sometimes, if he has money, he gives it away…”

“‘Gives it away.’ Jesus!”

It was particularly infuriating to Whitey that their son gave away money, small amounts to be sure, but more than a near-indigent like himself could afford, to such charitable organizations as a local animal rescue, a “green acres” wildlife sanctuary, environmental protection groups, the ACLU. Virgil was an occasional activist with Beasts of the Suburban Wild, an animal rights organization that intervened on the behalf of animals subjected to experiments in research laboratories; to Whitey’s consternation Virgil had been photographed, with a dozen other protesters, picketing Squire Laboratories, one of Whitey’s pharmaceutical clients. (Fortunately the picketers hadn’t been identified in the newspaper, nor was the photograph very clear.)

There was a philosophy behind this behavior, Virgil had tried to explain to Jessalyn. (Virgil dropped by the house at unexpected times. Or rather, since Virgil only dropped by when Jessalyn was likely to be alone, and Whitey was nowhere near, there had to be some element of the expected to his visits, but being Virgil, committed to spontaneity and taking each day as it came, he did not alert his mother beforehand.) “Extreme altruism”—was that it? Jessalyn had thought that you might start with a moderate sort of altruism, before working up to extreme, but there was no trying to convince Virgil, who would never do anything moderate if he could do it to an extreme.

Jessalyn hadn’t mentioned any of this to Whitey, for she didn’t want to provoke her excitable husband any further.

“What I think, Jessalyn, is that you are ‘enabling’ our son. As Lorene says. You have infantilized him, he will never grow up.”

“Whitey, that’s unfair. Virgil is far from being an ‘infant’—he’s probably the most socially conscious, intellectually engaged person we know. He just ‘marches to a different drummer’…”

“Wait. Who said that?”

“What?”

“‘Marches to a different drummer’—who said that about Virgil?”

In the midst of his disapproval of their son, Whitey was suddenly, inexplicably, smiling. Jessalyn was astonished.

In fact, it was Virgil himself who’d said, one day, with the air of one quoting a famous remark: “‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.’”

Jessalyn had asked Virgil who’d said this—(she’d thought that the remark was a brilliant one: she was determined to remember it)—and Virgil had said, with a shrug, “What does it matter who ‘said’ what, Mom? The important thing is, it got said.”

Now Jessalyn told Whitey she wasn’t sure. It was just something she’d heard about Virgil, or maybe someone like Virgil.

“The important thing is, darling—it got said.”

SHE DID WORRY ABOUT VIRGIL. She worried, with a mother’s obsessiveness, about whether he was happy; whether he would ever find anyone, who would make him happy.

Growing up he’d had numerous friends but never any close friends. So far as they knew, never any girlfriend.

Unlike Thom who’d had girls pursuing him.

How they were all living out on the farm on Bear Mountain Road, Jessalyn had no idea. Was it a hippie commune as in the 1960s, or was it just a large ramshackle house with shifting tenants? They grew organic vegetables, fruit. They kept chickens, and sold eggs. (Not the jumbo eggs Whitey liked [for his poached eggs] but malnourished little brown eggs, the shells shockingly dirty. Jessalyn felt obliged to purchase these eggs from Virgil whenever he brought a carton or two to her, but she used the eggs in ways that disguised their origins.)

Jessalyn knew that Virgil smoked “dope” (as he called it offhandedly) or rather that he had smoked “dope” years ago; whether he did now, in his more “organic” phase, she could not ask. With his disarming frankness Virgil would have told her possibly more than she wanted to know.

So too, she didn’t feel that she could ask about Virgil’s romantic life. If “romantic” was the word. She had certainly seen him in the company of women but whether these were romantic liaisons, she doubted. There was so little of possessiveness in Virgil, it didn’t seem likely that he was anyone’s lover.

(How possessive Whitey had been, when they’d first met! Those first months, before they were married! No one who’d seen them together, who’d seen how Whitey had looked at Jessalyn, could have doubted how he felt about her, and what their relationship was. The recollection made her shiver.)

But with Virgil, you never knew. Young people behaved differently today. They were well into the “new” century—the twenty-first century—and Jessalyn supposed old ways were just fading out no matter how people (like Whitey McClaren) disapproved.

Still, Jessalyn wished that Virgil would fall in love, and that someone would love him. She didn’t dare wish that he might get married and have children like her two oldest children—for Virgil that might be a stretch. But she could hope.

A very pretty girl with a small, triangular face, stunted and malformed body, shaved head that glinted metallic-blue—this was Virgil’s friend Sabine, a fellow artist whom Jessalyn had met by chance in Virgil’s company, in a North Hammond shopping center. Astonishing to look up and see her son pushing what appeared to be a petulant, bald child in a wheelchair! The two were headed for Home Depot.

“Mom, hello! I’d like you to meet my friend Sabine.”

Jessalyn had to lean down, to shake the girl’s small limp hand. Sabine stretched her mouth in a grudging grimace of a smile.

“Hello! Is it—‘Sabine’? That’s a beautiful name…”

So banal a remark, Sabine couldn’t be troubled to respond. She folded her thin arms tight across her thin chest in a way to suggest how barely contained was her impatience with Virgil, how strong her wish to escape into Home Depot.

But Virgil had no radar for social cues. Or, if he did, he was blithely indifferent to his friend’s restiveness.

Sabine was a “new arrival” at the farm, Jessalyn was told. She did “fantastical carvings” with natural wood. She had advanced degrees in computer science, statistics, and psychology; she’d published a book of poetry at the age of eighteen.

“I love poetry,” Jessalyn heard herself say, foolishly. “That is—when I can understand it.”

“It was Mom who introduced me to William Blake,” Virgil said, peering (fondly?) down at the top of Sabine’s bare, bluish head, “—even if she didn’t exactly understand Blake.”

“Do you understand Blake?”—Sabine glanced upward at Virgil with a startlingly quick smirk.

Virgil laughed, as if Sabine had said something witty.

Jessalyn wasn’t sure if the smirk on Sabine’s lips was sarcastic or affectionate or some mixture of the two, an intimate exchange that pointedly excluded her.

“Oh, you should come visit us, soon,” Jessalyn said, though the pained expression in the girl’s face made it clear that such a visit was not probable; like a runaway trailer truck on a steep incline she blundered on: “Some Sunday, Virgil? Bring Sabine to dinner?”

“Well, Mom—I’m not sure. Sabine is a vegan and also can’t tolerate gluten…”

Sabine glared at Jessalyn as if daring her to reiterate her invitation which of course Jessalyn did, if somewhat uncertainly. She could look up recipes online. She could make special dishes for Sabine. With forced enthusiasm Virgil said, “Thanks, Mom! Sounds wonderful.”

Biting her tongue not to say What about next Sunday? Or—the Sunday after that? Please.

Silent, Sabine continued to hug herself, tight. She might have been sixteen, or thirty-six. The squeezed-together little face was misleading. Her legs were skinny as sticks and her feet were the feet of a young child, in pink sneakers with checked laces. Even her teeth were child-sized.

“Well, Mom—great to see you. G’bye!”

With a look of relief Virgil pushed his friend away in the wheelchair as Jessalyn stood gazing after them.

She would tell Whitey—what? Impossible that she would fail to share this glimpse of Virgil with her dear husband, as she shared so much with Whitey, the very detritus of a day’s life; yet, she could not think how to suggest to him the teasingly ambiguous nature of Virgil’s manner with Sabine. Clearly they were very close friends, yet—how close? Could this peevish shrunken little Sabine be their son’s lover?

Jessalyn felt chagrin, thinking such thoughts. No, she didn’t want to envision.

In the end she’d told Whitey only that she had run into Virgil at the shopping center, with a fellow artist from the farm. Impulsively, she’d invited them to dinner.

“Good!”—Whitey was nodding, without having quite been listening.

“The friend is a girl. Quite pretty, and quite young.”

“Really! Good.”

“She’s a vegan. And she’s allergic to gluten.”

“Well. Most of the young people are, these days.”

“And she’s in a wheelchair.”

“In a wheelchair? Do you know why?”

Carefully Jessalyn told Whitey that she didn’t know. But she didn’t think it was anything “really extreme” like cystic fibrosis or—what was it?—Lou Gehrig’s disease…

“Well. I’m not surprised.”

“What do you mean, ‘not surprised’?”

“I don’t mean anything. Except it’s like Virgil to take up with someone like that.”

“‘Someone like that’—? You don’t even know the girl!”

“I don’t know the girl. That is true. But I know our son and his predilection for wounded things. Broken and crippled things.”

“Whitey, that’s a terrible thing to say. ‘Crippled’ is considered crude today. People say ‘handicapped’—”

“Actually, people say ‘challenged.’ But I’m not being critical of the girl, I’m just commenting on our son.” Whitey was becoming flush-faced as if his temperature were rising. “Remember the dog he brought home when he was ten? Missing a leg! If there’d been another dog, missing two legs, Virgil would have brought home that dog.”

“Oh, Whitey. You’re being ridiculous.”

“If there was a blind child within a ten-mile radius, that child would be Virgil’s friend. I think he actually went out bicycling to look for those signs—CAUTION BLIND CHILD IN NEIGHBORHOOD. Even his favorite teachers had something wrong with them, like the math teacher with the wooden leg—”

“—not wooden leg. They’re made out of something light and synthetic like plastic today, and they’re called ‘prosthetic limbs’—”

But Whitey was just being funny now. When he was upset, he’d never acknowledge it. Jessalyn let him go on.

So long as no one heard but her.

Though later when they were lying in bed in the darkness sifting through the events of the day as if casting a wide, fine-meshed net Whitey said suddenly, “You said she was a pretty girl? And she was a girl?”

“Of course she was a girl, Whitey! Her name was Sabine.”

Jessalyn considered. “Her name is Sabine.”

BUT MONTHS PASSED, and Virgil didn’t bring Sabine to the house as he was always promising. “Soon, Mom! It’s just a kind of busy time right now. We’re planting.”

Or, “We’re harvesting.”

It was not helpful to pin Virgil down. For really you could not pin Virgil down.

If she pressed him Virgil would stay away from the house altogether. Or he would agree to come to dinner and never show up. And that would irritate Whitey. (Though Whitey didn’t have to know, always.) And since Virgil had no phone, there was no way to easily contact him.

Eventually Virgil’s replies became more clearly evasive. He was still saying “yes” but there was a hurt look in his face that Jessalyn wished not to acknowledge.

Finally asking him, “Are you still seeing Sabine?”

“Yes. Every day. We share a household, Mom.”

Virgil spoke with pained patience. She saw, up close, how his forehead was furrowed with fine, near-invisible lines—her younger son! His teeth were discolored, faintly. His eyes were furtive.

Badly Jessalyn was wanting to ask—But are you in love with her? Is she in love with you? Are the two of you—together?

The moment passed. She could not ask. And Virgil would not volunteer to tell her.

He’d bicycled to the house that morning, a weekday. Of course, Whitey was away.

Mother and son were outside in Jessalyn’s garden, at the side of the house. When Virgil came to visit he was never idle. Weeding, hoeing, watering, clearing away storm debris from the lawn, helping in the kitchen—Virgil took pleasure in every sort of household task so long as he wasn’t expected to do any task and especially to show up at any particular time.

“Is her health—all right?”

“Why wouldn’t it be? It’s a condition she has, not an illness. Not a curse.”

He’d been yanking weeds from a patch of Shasta daisies, and was smelling of his body.

It was one of those days, Virgil asked if he could take a shower at the house. God knew what showers and tubs were like at the farmhouse on Bear Mountain Road…

After Virgil washed his hair Jessalyn volunteered to comb out snarls for (it seemed) Virgil could not be trusted to comb snarls out for himself. His hair fell to his shoulders, beautiful hair Jessalyn thought, wavy, with coppery highlights; it was hair very like her own, as his eyes resembled hers. It made her laugh, to be so maudlin and so foolish.

Though she dared not pry into her son’s personal life she retained still a mother’s prerogative regarding the general cleanliness and grooming of her (adult) children.

Later, straddling his bicycle, that Beverly’s teenaged children marveled at as the ugliest bicycle they’d ever seen, and loved to post on Facebook, Virgil said, with a bright smile, as if he’d only just thought of it, “Maybe Sunday, Mom. I mean—Sabine. Dinner here. Sunday after next. OK?”

AND IS THAT SABINE, with Virgil now?

Jessalyn has found herself staring at a tall, slope-shouldered young man on the far side of the café—the young man’s fair, fawn-colored hair has been pulled back into a ponytail, and he is wearing farmers’ overalls, and a black T-shirt beneath.

So this is where Virgil has been!—in the hospital café.

(Hiding away, as Beverly says.)

Jessalyn doesn’t want to stare. It is always an awkward matter, coming upon one of the children when he/she doesn’t know that you are there, and (certainly) you have no intention of spying on them…

In the hospital café, at a table near floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows, silhouetted by bright, mildly dazzling light, her son Virgil and a girl, or a young woman, whose face Jessalyn can’t see clearly—(but is this person bald? is she wearing a little knitted cap of the kind chemotherapy patients wear, or is her hair just cut very short? It isn’t even clear from where Jessalyn is positioned that the girl is in a wheelchair, or merely in a chair)—in what appears to be an earnest conversation.

Jessalyn’s eyes flood with tears in even mild light. Indeed, she can’t trust her eyes. And her view of the couple in the café is blocked by other people.

“Here’s a table, Mom!”—Beverly has her elbow, firmly.

Jessalyn is feeling shaky. She has not left Whitey’s bedside for several hours. Knows it is ridiculous, superstitious, but fears that something terrible could happen to her husband if she is not present…

Mom has forgotten to eat, has she? Beverly has been scolding her.

Won’t do Daddy any good if you’re sick, too. Mom, please!

That morning when they’d arrived at Whitey’s room soon after 7:00 A.M. it was to discover that his bed was gone—Jessalyn gave a little cry and almost fainted…

But Whitey had been taken downstairs to Radiology for tests. A nurse hurriedly explained.

Beverly said curtly: “For God’s sake, you should place some sort of notice on the outside of the door! You must scare visitors practically to death all the time.”

But to Jessalyn she said, “Mom, don’t be so upset. We can figure that Dad is being ‘tested.’ The neurologist told us yesterday afternoon he’d ordered an fMRI for today.”

Was this so? Had she known? Jessalyn was too agitated to remember.

Seeing the empty space where his bed had been. White walls, ceiling. A look of such absence, she’d been unable to comprehend what it might mean.

“They would have notified us if—if—there’d been some radical change in Dad’s condition. They wouldn’t have just cleared out the damned room.”

Beverly spoke with such vehemence, you might have thought that was exactly what she’d expected the hospital staff would do.

When after forty minutes the patient was wheeled back to the room, IV lines attached, eyes still (lightly) closed and face (seemingly) slack it did appear that there was a subtle change in him. Jessalyn stared, and smiled—Whitey’s skin definitely looked less waxen, his lips less blue. As if blood and heat were flowing back into him.

And he was off the respirator now, breathing through an (unobtrusive) oxygen tube.

Though his every breath had to be monitored to determine what degree of oxygen he was drawing into his lungs, yet the miracle was he was breathing on his own.

The neurologist had told them, the previous day, that Whitey’s reactions were improving. Very slowly, but improving.

You could see, grasping Whitey’s hand, that the fingers quivered in a way they had not previously. Almost, you could feel that the fingers were trying to squeeze in acknowledgment, recognition.

Hi! Hello! I am here.

Sometimes, Whitey’s eyelids fluttered as if he were waking from a deep gluey sleep. You could catch a glimpse of his (bloodshot) eyes—one, the left, seemed (almost) in focus.

“Whitey! Darling, can you hear me?”

“Hey Dad, hi! It’s Beverly…”

It was exhausting, such hope.

For it seemed to them, the McClarens, that their beloved Whitey was struggling beneath the surface of an element like water, transparent, yet palpable, trying to forcibly thrust himself into wakefulness—but growing exhausted suddenly, sinking back.

“Dad? Hi, it’s Thom…”

“Daddy? It’s Sophia…”

It was crucial for them to continue to talk to him, they were told.

Yes (perhaps) (possibly) he could hear them. Though he was (still) unresponsive yet that did not mean he wasn’t hearing.

Softly, Virgil played his flute for his father. Unless this was a new woodwind instrument he’d carved for himself, and painted robin’s-egg blue. A breathy sound like whispers, so faint and unobtrusive it seemed to have virtually no melody.

“What is that tune, Virgil? I can almost recognize it…”

“It isn’t a ‘tune.’ It’s breath—my breath. Pure sound before it becomes subjected into music.”

Did Whitey hear Virgil’s breath-music? Jessalyn stared at his lips which seemed (she thought) to move—or nearly.

The good news was: damage to Whitey’s brain appeared to be “not extensive” but “localized.” He’d had a hemorrhagic stroke involving a major artery in the region of the cerebellum and swift surgical intervention and intravenous treatment within three hours of the stroke had almost certainly saved his life.

They were shown the fMRI video. Fascinating, appalling, to peer into the interior of Whitey’s head, to see how ghostly the brain is, its textures blurred so that you saw only the shadowy pulsing of blood. And what a curious sort of eagerness in that pulsing, like life!

(Like the living fetus in the womb. If the fetus were a soul, bodiless but pulsing with life.)

No dark, gnarly tumors or blood clots. But there was a shaded and striated area of damage: “deficit.”

Jessalyn felt light-headed, staring. For where was her husband, where was the man she knew, in this—X-ray?

The fMRI was not an X-ray machine, they were told. Its images were formed by establishing a “magnetic field” and “pulses of radio waves”; it did not involve radiation and so was not dangerous unless the patient was wakened by deafening thunder-claps inside the machine, that earphones could not suppress, and was thrown into some sort of seizure.

Did that happen often?—Jessalyn asked, alarmed.

Not often. Statistically.

She could not bear to think that Whitey was frightened, or subjected to pain. That he had no idea what had happened to him or where he was or—what would happen…

Sophia, who knew something of the latest imaging machines from her neuroscience courses at Cornell, described how the patient was trussed up in a kind of cylinder and “inserted” into the interior of the machine for about thirty minutes, to determine injury to the brain’s functions. The technology was miraculous—Sophia thought—for it could prove that a stroke victim was still brain-alive, still-conscious in a part of his brain, though outwardly paralyzed and nonresponsive. How many individuals, paralyzed by strokes, had been wrongly diagnosed as in a “vegetative” state and left to die…

In Whitey McClaren’s case, definitely the patient was brain-alive, beginning to be responsive.

He’d suffered the trauma of the stroke, and of a probable seizure. He’d suffered the trauma of anesthesia and surgery. He was being treated intravenously for vascular occlusion and his vital signs were being closely monitored.

Most stroke victims require extensive rehabilitation, therapy. In Whitey’s case, if and when he recovered sufficiently to be transferred to a stroke therapy rehabilitation center, it would be a matter of—well, many weeks—months…

When would my husband be able to come home, Jessalyn knew it was futile to ask, for how could Dr. Friedland reasonably answer such a question, yet, she heard herself ask, a frightened wife’s query, and the doctor said with disarming frankness that he had no idea—though maybe in a day or two, he would know more.

And where was the rehab center?

Excellent stroke rehab facilities in Rochester. Not the nearest but the best.

Seventy miles, approximately. Eventually Whitey could be an outpatient, and live at home.

Live at home. Good news!

But an odd way of phrasing it—Live at home. Somehow, there was something ominous about these words.

(And is he with Sabine? Are the two—together?)

Jessalyn doesn’t tell the others that Virgil is in the café. They have not noticed him, amid a crowd of customers.

At about ten o’clock that morning Virgil had arrived at Whitey’s room. He’d played his flute for a while, and it had seemed that, just possibly, Whitey was hearing the breathy, sweet sounds… Then a nurse interrupted, needing to draw Whitey’s blood from his poor bruised arm, and Virgil had quickly retreated.

“Mom? Try to eat this. And this mushroom quiche, we can share.”

Beverly is humming under her breath. The consultation with Dr. Friedland this morning was so—encouraging!

Jessalyn understands, the children are terrified of losing their father. When a father has been so strong…

She is only half-listening to Beverly. And there has come Lorene to join them, but Lorene (as usual) is frowning into her cell phone.

Thom should arrive soon, he has said. And Sophia is upstairs at Whitey’s bedside, contentedly working on her laptop, processing data for a project at Radcliffe Research Partners.

Is that Sabine? Sitting at a table with Virgil, silhouetted in a bright haze of sunshine?

Jessalyn wants to think so. Little Sabine in her wheelchair exhibited a strong enough will, Virgil’s flightiness might well be held in check.

(But why would Sabine be here at Hammond General Hospital? Surely not to accompany Virgil.)

It makes Jessalyn uncomfortable to think of her youngest son’s sexuality, if that’s what it is—his intense, seductive, yet (she has always thought) unconscious manner; his soft-modulated voice, his way of leaning forward and listening closely, staring you in the eyes…

Your son is so—unusual, Jessalyn!

It’s obvious that he is an artist, or a poet—someone special.

Strange that, often, Virgil attracts girls and women without seeming to be attracted to them, himself.

Sabine had seemed different, somehow. In the brief moments Jessalyn had seen the two together, Sabine had impressed her as the more willful of the two.

Not nice of Whitey to have asked if Virgil’s friend was a girl.

(And what if Virgil’s friend in the wheelchair had been a young man, what difference would that make?—Jessalyn wanted to confront her husband.)

It is not her business, Jessalyn tells herself. She must not interfere with Virgil’s life, even to wish for him a happy and fulfilling life, a “normal” life with a companion, love…

She has seen how awkward Virgil is with men of a certain type—men like Thom, or Whitey. That kind of aggressive male, who takes for granted his masculine authority. Half-consciously Virgil has learned to shrink from Thom, to try to avoid Thom’s scrutiny. Jessalyn doesn’t want to think that Thom might have bullied his much-younger brother when he’d been in high school…

And she has many times seen how Virgil shrinks from Whitey’s gaze. His father’s (harsh) judgment.

She has wished that Whitey could love Virgil as he did the other children. Thom he’d adored as (one might as well concede) a small-scale version of himself, even as a toddler; the girls he’d adored as girls.

When Thom was newly born Whitey had regarded him, the tiny infant, with an expression of intense love, bafflement, wonder and awe. He had never expected to be so “crazy” over a baby!—he’d claimed. He marveled at the fact that, though the baby had been born at one of the busiest times in Whitey’s life, when as a relatively inexperienced CEO of a small, struggling company he’d had to finesse business deals that might have fallen through, and precipitated bankruptcy, Whitey had spent hours just staring at the baby.

Yes, he’d tried to “diaper” the baby. That had not gone so well.

That love, for the firstborn, had been profound for Whitey. Jessalyn had realized what a good, kind, responsible man she’d married. And the girl-babies, Whitey had loved deeply as well, though his paternal infatuation had not been so intense. Even Lorene, the most independent-minded of the five children, from childhood the most contentious, did not seem to present any threat to her father’s authority, as (evidently, inadvertently) Virgil does.

The child least loved by one parent will be most loved by the other.

(Who said that? A wise man like William Blake? Walt Whitman? Or, Jessalyn herself?)

“Mom, hi!”—Thom has arrived, stooping to give his mother a kiss on the cheek.

In his usual robust mood Thom pulls over a chair to the table and joins them. How tall, how handsome her oldest child is—blunt-jawed, with Whitey’s slightly recessed eyes, Whitey’s way of swooping at you. Impossible to believe that Thom is in his late thirties, he is so boyish and energetic.

Yet: Thom’s hand, gripping Jessalyn’s briefly, is surprisingly cold.

He is fearful of the hospital, Jessalyn knows. Fearful of how Whitey will look when he enters his room.

Quickly Thom is assured: the latest fMRI results are very encouraging. It looks as if Whitey will be discharged to a stroke rehabilitation center soon…

(Is this what Dr. Friedland told them? Jessalyn tries to recall the neurologist’s exact words but cannot.)

At last, on the far side of the café, Virgil and his companion (clearly not Sabine) are on their feet. The shapely-bodied young woman is hardly a girl but Virgil’s age at least, in a white lab coat, one of the medical staff whom Virgil has befriended.

A young doctor? A therapist? Her hair has been cut very short—but she doesn’t have a shaved head. She is no one Jessalyn recalls having seen before. Virgil has been meeting people in the hospital, even sketching some of the medical staff. He has roamed about the corridors sketching what he sees—(Jessalyn hopes, with permission). It is like Virgil to strike up such acquaintances, if but fleetingly.

The young woman touches Virgil’s arm lightly as she turns to leave. Virgil smiles after her—then turns aside, resumes his seat at the table, takes up whatever she has left on her plate, and eats it with his fingers; happily content to be alone, and to open his sketchbook.

Immediately, Virgil has forgotten the woman. You can see.

Scrub his soul clean he’d said. Jessalyn has no idea what that could possibly mean.

“Evidence”

“Thom! What on earth are you doing…”

On his iPhone Thom was taking pictures of their father’s (visible) injuries. Small, circular wounds on his face, throat, hands. Even his arms were bruised, burnt-looking, though he’d been wearing shirtsleeves, coat sleeves, at the time of the “accident.”

“You’re violating Daddy’s privacy, Thom! You know how sensitive Daddy is, he hates to appear weak or sick, he certainly won’t want anyone seeing how ravaged he looks right now…”

It was unfortunate, Thom’s bossiest sister had walked into the room. He hadn’t expected anyone for a few minutes at least. Whitey was deeply unconscious and “peaceful”—unaware of anyone in the room (Thom was sure); breathing slowly, rhythmically, not erratically as before but with a raspish sound like stiff paper being crinkled.

“I’m talking to you, Thom. Don’t just ignore me!”

Thom ignored her, and continued taking pictures. An older brother isn’t required to justify actions to any younger sibling and that does not alter with age.

Lorene tried to snatch the iPhone from Thom’s hand and he snatched it away from her, and gave her a little shove.

“Quit it. You damn bully.”

“You—mind your own business.”

“Daddy is my business…”

How swiftly they reverted to childhood. Adolescence. The two strongest-willed McClaren kids, whom no one could push around.

“Daddy is our collective ‘business.’ Keep your voice down, he might hear you.”

“Keep your voice down, you’re standing right over him.”

Thom had not wanted to tell anyone about the situation, yet—the situation is how he thought of it.

Their father’s injuries not (seemingly) the consequence of the stroke.

Not from a car crash.

Not from an air bag.

Thom had taken a dozen pictures which he now mailed to himself. Shutting off the phone then, and slipping it into his pocket.

“I—I just don’t think—under the circumstances,” Lorene said, not quite so bossy now, her voice faltering, “with Daddy so helpless, and looking so old—I just don’t think it’s nice.”

“All right. I’m sorry.”

“You know how sensitive he is. How vain…”

“No one will see the pictures, I promise.”

“Then why are you taking them?”

“Just for the record. For me.”

ALREADY HE’D BROUGHT UP the situation to Morton Kaplan.

Saying he had reason to suspect that his father’s injuries hadn’t been made by air bag detonation, or any kind of crash—“I’m thinking maybe—stun guns? Tasers?”

“Taser? You mean, police?”

“I’m thinking, maybe. Yes.”

Kaplan did not seem so impressed as Thom might have expected. Not so incensed as you’d think an acquaintance of Whitey McClaren might reasonably be.

Even after Thom showed him the iPhone pictures the doctor seemed doubtful, like one who will have to be convinced.

“But why? Why would the police do a thing like that, to a man your father’s age, who’d had a stroke while driving his car?”

The Swimmer

Help me. Give me your hand.

He is begging. For he can see them—just barely.

Beneath the surface of the water he is a shadowy figure like a shark.

Moving slowly, laboriously. Arms and legs like lead.

Their voices he can hear, at a little distance.

He can’t speak, his throat has been soldered shut.

An agitation of all his limbs but with difficulty for the water is gluey-thick.

He has never been a confident swimmer. Now too late.

Yet, he is able to breathe. Only just barely.

They have drilled a tiny hole in his throat. They have inserted a very thin straw. Through this straw, just enough oxygen flows to his brain to keep him alive.

But no, that is mistaken. Instead, the tiny hole is in his trachea. It is a hot acid substance that is being injected.

An oxygen tube in his nostrils. Very light, plastic.

IV line directly into his heart. A steady pumping.

His skull they’d opened. He’d heard the drill. Smelled burning bone. A flap of skin. Blood noisily sucked through straws.

Hopes that by this time they have removed the old, contaminated blood in all his veins. (He’d heard the pumps, like straining septic pumps, through the night.)

(And the night is perpetual. What you’d suppose might sometimes be day is in fact night.)

So tired! But—he will not give up…

At last—(or is it again)—he is approaching the water’s surface. Churning light-dazzling surface through which he must break…

On the other side, their faces. Voices.

Whitey. Darling!

Dad.

The Party

“Mom, and Sophia, ride with me.”

“Wait! Mom is riding with me.”

“Mom rode with you this morning. She’s said she wants to ride back home with me now…”

“Mom and I have things to talk about.”

“Mom and I have things to talk about.”

QUICKLY IT HAD HAPPENED, she’d become a person who is taken places—a passenger.

A person discussed in the third person: she, her. Mom.

“LET ME FEED YOU SOMETHING, please! I haven’t turned on the stove for days…”

In the refrigerator were eggs, bacon. In the freezer, Pacific North-west smoked salmon, Whitey’s favorite. And frozen whole grain bread from the Farm Market.

She was very tired. In fact, her head was reeling. Yet there she was—(poor, desperate Mom)—all but begging.

Such pleasure it would give her, in this time of strain, to prepare a meal, not a lavish meal, not even a proper supper, but a kind of midnight-breakfast, for them. The children.

And who would most enjoy such an impromptu meal at the sprawling old house on Old Farm Road?—who would delight in setting out his favorite cheeses, provolone, cheddar, Brie, with his favorite Swedish crackers?—taking out a six-pack of dark German ale from the refrigerator, passing around tall glasses?

Smiling, to think of Whitey. Exactly the sort of family gathering without planning, without fuss, that would make her husband very happy.

“Mom, no! We wouldn’t hear of it.”

“You sit down, Mom. We’ll feed you.”

Planning ahead, Beverly had brought several frozen pizzas to the house earlier that day. Despite Jessalyn’s protests they would devour these like ravenous children.

Insisting that Mom sit down, please.

She was not to wait on them.

“Mom, no.”

“But—”

“We said, Mom! No.”

When Whitey was discharged from the hospital, and came home, she would prepare all his meals—of course. She would nurse him, as much as he needed. Gratefully!

Possibly, the stairs would be too much for Whitey, at first. That was a distinct likelihood for (it seemed) he had lost the ability to move his right leg—(temporarily, it was hoped). Therapy would restore his ability to walk but that would take time.

Already she was planning to convert the first-floor guest room at the rear of the house into a room for Whitey. There was a door that opened out onto the redwood deck. There was a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the creek at the foot of the hill.

She too would move into this room—of course. For Whitey did not like to sleep alone, ever.

Those days he’d been out of town on business, or politics. Overnight in Albany, New York City. Calling her to say how he missed her.

Keep waking up during the night thinking something is wrong—what’s missing? My dear wife.

It had been a hopeful day at the hospital. Whitey was being treated with a combination of drugs to reduce his high blood pressure and the vascular occlusion. Another drug, to stabilize his heartbeat. The broken artery in his brain had been surgically repaired. His blood work and vital signs were near-normal—heart, lungs, liver, kidneys. He had regained a tenuous sort of consciousness that emerged and faded and emerged again like a weak radio station and he was able now to swallow liquids, carefully spoon-fed to him.

Swallowing reflexes had returned. This was a good sign!

Soon, a diet of easily masticated food—“mechanical soft.”

Still, the words vascular occlusion had a harrowing sound.

Very hard to leave the patient. Now that he was conscious at least part of the time, and making an effort to speak…

But today had been a good day for soon, it seemed, Whitey would be able to speak above a hoarse hissing whisper. Soon, his words would be intelligible.

His “good” eye was ever more in focus. (It was not clear if his ravaged right eye could “see.”)

Certainly, Whitey recognized his wife. His dear wife.

Several times he had seemed (almost) to be smiling at her, with half his mouth.

It will take time. There are sometimes setbacks.

His good eye swimming in tears focused on her face until the vision seemed to fade, the light to go out, whatever inside had been seeing her vanished like an extinguished flame.

She was reminded of holding an infant in her lap.

Her children, in the first weeks after birth. Her grandchildren.

That rapt stare of the infant. The eye that seems to be all iris, staring.

Greedy to know, to learn. In awe of all that there will be, to be stored inside the brain.

Leaning to kiss the infant’s hot little brow.

Leaning to kiss the husband’s (just slightly overwarm) brow.

Love you love you love you

Surest communication with a stroke victim (the nurses said) is touch.

Healing takes time. Therapy requires time.

How long? Impossible to say.

It filled her with horror to abandon him. To seem (to him?) to be abandoning him in that place, in that bed and in that room where he would be alone until in the morning she could return, to take his hand in hers, to kiss him.

But they were not allowed to remain overnight in the Intensive Care Unit and it was crucial (they were told) for them to maintain their own well-being, to sleep each night.

Damn hospitals breeding grounds for germs, viruses. What do they call them—staph infections.

Keep me out of God damn hospitals!

(She smiled, hearing Whitey’s voice. How vehement he often was, meaning to be funny!)

(Were they observing her, smiling to herself? Were they wondering why?)

Pungent odor of dark German ale. Melting cheese, pizza dough.

Beneath, a smell of—was it cigarette smoke?

But none of the children smoked any longer. And Whitey had quit, years ago.

Not easy for Whitey to quit smoking. Poor Dad!

Those Cuban cigars, Jessalyn had not liked. No.

She had never asked him pointedly to stop smoking. Only just not to smoke his cigars in the house.

’Course not, darlin’. Cigar smoke is not an easily acquired taste.

It had evolved into a kind of joke between them.

Many things had been jokes between them: Jessalyn’s habit of keeping things clean and tidy, Whitey’s habit of letting things fall where they would.

Jessalyn’s way of driving—“defensively.”

Whitey’s way of driving—“offensively.”

The subject of Whitey’s Toyota Highlander came up. Thom was saying he’d examined the vehicle and near as he could tell, there had been no “crash.” The air bags had not been “detonated.”

What’s that mean?—Lorene asked.

The edge of the table was rising. A sudden sharp blow, against the side of her face.

“Mom! For heaven’s sake…”

“…help her up. We’d better get her to bed.”

She was protesting she was all right but they ignored her. Trying to lift her for she could not seem to arrange her legs beneath her, that she might rise from the table.

Something had fallen over. A fork had clattered to the floor.

One of them taking her hand. “Mom? Lean on me.”

As once she’d taken children upstairs to bed in this house. Slipping her fingers through the children’s fingers when they would allow her. Tugging at them as they balked wanting to stay up later, with the other, older children.

Someday soon, they were promised. They could stay up as late as nine o’clock.

No, no!—they did not want to stay up until nine o’clock someday soon but that very night.

Now, she could not recall the children. Might’ve been Thom, might’ve been Lorene. Stubborn strong-willed children.

Recalling with a smile how their father would seize a misbehaving child, lift him (or her) into the air, legs thrashing. Set him (or her) onto his shoulders, for a “daddy-back-ride.”

Like a flock of geese, trying to herd them. Their children!

Individually each had been tractable enough. Whitey agreed. But together, you could not keep them all in focus. Like those large white waddling geese, you might try to herd along a path.

As you kept one or two of the geese moving in the correct direction, one or two others would drift off in the wrong direction.

“You are staying the night, I hope?—you aren’t going to drive home at this hour…”

“Yes, Mom. We’re staying the night.”

She could relax, then. All of them in the house, beneath the roof. Safe.

On the stairs she was trying to walk unassisted but they held her secure as if they did not trust her.

She was trying to explain to them that, when Whitey came home, they would both sleep in the downstairs guest room, but they seemed scarcely to hear her, helping her undress, urging her into bed.

Wanting to take a hot bath but she was just too tired. Smelling of her body probably but too tired, in the morning perhaps…

She’d been waking early. That was the problem.

Fell into a deep delirious sleep but woke after two or three hours in the utter darkness listening to her lone heartbeat.

Trying to recall the distinction between a CT scan and an MRI. The distinction between an MRI and an fMRI.

The precise names of the (very expensive) drugs being dripped into Whitey’s veins to reduce the terrible occlusion that threatened to kill him.

On a sheet of paper she’d written down—words… No idea how to spell them, not wanting to ask the neurologist.

(But where was the sheet of paper? She was sure she’d lost it.)

(No. It was in her purse, somewhere. She could retrieve it another time.)

(At the hospital she’d broken into a cold sweat convinced that she’d misplaced her wallet. In it were credit cards, insurance cards, driver’s license, twenty- and fifty-dollar bills Whitey had given her to put in her wallet “just in case”—she’d hurried back to a restroom to see if the wallet was there but had not found it. And then, searching through her purse another time, amid crumpled tissues, folded sheets of paper, the cell phone Whitey had purchased for her which she rarely used—she’d found it. Oh God thank you.)

“Is this your nightgown, Mom? You’re still wearing this?”—Beverly treated her with such bemused tenderness you’d think that Jessalyn was (already) an invalid.

What was wrong with Jessalyn’s old floral-print flannel nightgown? It was Whitey’s favorite nightie of hers no matter how thin it was becoming.

The daughters were glancing around the room. This was their parents’ bedroom—the “master bedroom” that had been a place of some mystery to them when they were growing up for (they’d sensed) they were not welcome in this room unless invited inside.

It was a large room with filmy white curtains that, in warm weather, when the windows were open, stirred and rippled in the breeze like something living and had made Sophia (as a child) hurry past the room without wanting to glance inside for the sinuous movement of the curtains made her uneasy.

Sophia was hanging back now, as her older sisters fussed over their mother. She’d grown to dislike Lorene, and she was finding Beverly grating, so overblown, so emotional. They were trying to appropriate their mother’s anxiety, to make it something within their power to alleviate. She felt a rush of resentment for them, pure rage.

Her older sisters had always intimidated Sophia. Lorene in particular had bullied her. Beverly had been so fleshy… Sophia winced to recall Beverly’s brassieres, the size of the “cups,” repulsive to Sophia who was so much smaller than Beverly, yet objects of surreptitious fascination like the sisters’ “periods” that were crudely kept secrets of great embarrassment to Sophia.

Just shut up about it! Please.

Did Jessalyn know? Could Jessalyn guess, how her youngest daughter was intimidated by her sisters?

Terrible to think, unless it was amusing, how the old, established patterns of childhood prevailed into adulthood.

“Mom, you made up your bed. The room is so neat.”

But why was this surprising? That Jessalyn took time every morning to carefully make this bed, to tuck the sheets in neatly and smooth the white satin spread regardless of whether she’d slept by herself and regardless of the family crisis?

The girls were laughing at her, tenderly. She didn’t want to think that their eyes were wet with tears.

It was so, like a sleepwalker Jessalyn kept things clean in the household. In order. Picking up Whitey’s clothes where he’d flung them, setting his shoes in a row, in his closet. Socks, underwear. Car keys, wallet, cell phone, pocket address book—things Whitey was always misplacing. And now that Whitey hadn’t slept in this room for several days the spaces that were normally his, comfortably cluttered, askew, now unnaturally clean, were a rebuke to her who prized a trivial matter like neatness so highly.

Thinking of a remark of Louisa May Alcott that had struck her, years ago—When will I have time to rest? When I die.

When will the house be perfectly clean and in order? When—the husband dies.

Crucial not to faint. Not while the girls are here.

Lie down quickly in the bed, position your head carefully, not too high on a pillow. Blood will rush into the brain and restore consciousness.

“Mom, good night! Make sure you sleep.”

One by one they kissed her. Switched off lights, left the room.

Drifting off to sleep hearing voices downstairs. Far away, in the kitchen.

The comfort of voices. At this lonely time.

She was holding his hand in the dark. His fingers gripping hers. In this bed. In the dark.

Sounds like a party, downstairs. Who is it?

Who do you think, darling? The kids.

The kids! They sound happy.

Yes—maybe. They are trying to be happy.

But why aren’t we with them, Jessalyn? Why are we up here? Let’s go downstairs and join them.

Whitey restless and excited, swinging his bare legs out of the bed, impatient, perplexed, why are the two of them hidden away upstairs in bed like elderly invalids when the kids are downstairs in the kitchen eating pizza (unmistakably, Whitey can smell pizza), drinking his ale and beer, as if they’d never left home and yet: fact is, when they’d lived at home, the kids had never hung out together in the kitchen at such an hour, they’d had their own friends, they were the wrong ages to socialize together, it is strange, unnatural, that they are together now, what is it, what has brought them back home, some kind of God damn wake?

Whitey, on the verge of being incensed with her, demanded to know.

Mutant

“Virgil! Where the hell are you always going.”

Maddening to them, the responsible McClaren children, how at the hospital Virgil was always disappearing.

He’d arrive with the others in the morning, visit with Dad maybe ten-fifteen minutes. Play his ridiculous flute. (As if, in the condition he was in, poor Dad wanted to hear a God damn flute.) Then you’d look around, and Virgil was gone.

Later he’d appear like nothing was wrong, he’d been here all along.

(Somewhere in the hospital? Sketching in his artiste’s book? “Making friends” in his hippie-hypocrite way?)

When Virgil did sit in the lounge with the others, couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes. Couldn’t bear the TV (CNN “Breaking News”—nonstop). If you tried to talk to him about something serious he’d answer with a vague Virgil-smile and a few seconds later excuse himself and disappear.

Only if Sophia particularly pressed him would Virgil have a meal with her in the café downstairs. Rarely with his older sisters and virtually never with Thom if he could avoid it.

Even with his mother at the hospital Virgil behaved strangely. You wanted to strangle him, sometimes!

His dishwater-blond hair, tied back in a slovenly ponytail, was unwashed and matted. His long skinny bony feet, in sandals, looked coated with ash. His clothes were ridiculous—hippie-farmer overalls, rumpled pull-over jerseys. And the sketchbook! And the hand-carved “flute”! Yet, maddeningly, young and not-so-young women often glanced at him with small smiles of interest, expectation.

Excuse me! Are you—?

(Beverly and Lorene were astonished to overhear an attractive young woman ask Virgil if he was that artist Virgil McNamara—who lives in Hammond and makes animal sculptures?)

(How incensed they were that Virgil replied with his usual faux-modesty—Just “Virgil.” Yes, that’s me.)

Certainly it was Virgil who evinced the least worry or concern about their father. If he couldn’t avoid a conversation about Whitey with his mother, his brother, his sisters he would manage to deflect it onto other matters—an environmental activists’ organization with which he was involved, Save Our Great Lakes; an animal rights’ organization preparing to picket a research laboratory in Rochester where rabbits were being used in cruel experiments testing the safety of cosmetics, Mercy for Animals. Virgil’s mind seemed to fasten, like a hungry boa constrictor, upon any crisis other than the family crisis at hand.

With the others he’d listened to Dr. Friedland speaking at length about Whitey’s condition and the physical therapy he would have to have to restore “cognitive” and “motor” skills that had been impaired by the stroke; he’d listened, or given the impression of listening, to the doctor speak of how Whitey would need support in every way, emotional, and also literal—help in walking, talking, eating and drinking, hours of practice each day, both in the rehab clinic and at home. When he came home.

Everyone asked—when would Whitey come home? Except Virgil.

Everyone had questions for Dr. Friedland. Except Virgil.

Especially Sophia with her background in biology and neuroscience had questions to ask about their father’s medical treatment—(the others were impressed with the youngest sister, who knew so much that they didn’t know, and could articulate her questions so intelligently; much of the time Sophia was the quiet one, easily overlooked).

And then, when they glanced around—Virgil had slipped out of the doctor’s office and vanished.

“HE DOESN’T CARE AT ALL that Daddy is seriously ill.”

“It isn’t real to him… I think that’s it.”

“All that’s real to Virgil is Virgil. That’s all.”

“MAYBE HE HAS ‘RESTLESS LEG SYNDROME.’”

“Is that a joke, or is that real?”

“What? ‘Restless leg syndrome’—a joke—I think.”

“No, actually—I think it’s real. ‘Restless leg syndrome’—you read about it in the newspaper—is some kind of neurological impairment.”

“Are you sure? It sounds like a joke.”

“I swear, Steve has it, or something like it—‘restless leg’—he’s always twitching. Especially in his sleep…”

“That’s what Virgil has: a ‘neurological impairment.’ Part of his brain is missing.”

“Don’t be silly! You always exaggerate. Virgil is just spoiled, lazy… Mom has spoiled him.”

“Don’t blame Mom! She has not spoiled Virgil, he has spoiled himself.”

“Some part of his brain is missing—the part that is sensitive to social cues. He’s like—one of those”—(Beverly hesitated, uncertain of the clinical term she was seeking: not asparagus, though she knew it resembled asparagus. But if she uttered the word, in this context a silly word, the others would laugh at her, and the point she was trying to make about their brother, a point with which [she knew] they concurred, would be lost)—“autistic persons. Except he’s a high-performing autistic. He lacks empathy with people he should feel empathy for, like his family, and he has empathy for the wrong people, total strangers—and animals! He understands that our father had a stroke and that he might have died but it isn’t real to him the way it’s real to us.”

These smug, cruel words made Sophia squirm. For the past several minutes she’d been resisting the impulse to press the palms of her hands over her ears. Now, she leapt to her feet: “You’re all too judgmental! Virgil cares for Daddy in his own way. You don’t like Virgil because you don’t understand Virgil. Deep in your hearts you’re jealous of him.”

Sophia hurried from the room. Thom, Beverly, Lorene stared after her astonished.

In a lowered voice Beverly said with a grim smile, “Her, too.”

“DADDY WOULDN’T MIND in the slightest.”

“Are you kidding? Daddy would love this.”

That night, drinking Whitey’s Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey in the kitchen of the house on Old Farm Road.

They weren’t bothering to microwave pizzas tonight. They’d eaten in the hospital café earlier that evening, in shifts. In the cupboard they’d discovered boxes of cereal, Wheaties, Cheerios, Rice Chex, they were devouring in handfuls, like nuts. Remains of Whitey’s favorite cheeses, the last of the Swedish crackers. A jar of peanut butter, eaten with spoons as they’d never dared eat it when they were children in this house.

“Did you know, there’s a specific phobia about peanut butter?—‘fear of peanut butter sticking between teeth.’”

“No! You made that up.”

“I did not. Why’d I even think of anything so weird?”

“There are all kinds of phobias. Claustrophobia, agoraphobia—everybody knows about them. But there’s ‘equinophobia’—fear of horses. There’s fear of spiders, cockroaches—”

“There’s fear of dogs, sex, blood, death… Anything, you can add ‘phobia.’”

“That’s right. Anything.”

Flatly Thom spoke. The topic had worn itself out.

Jessalyn had gone to bed almost as soon as she’d come home from the hospital. Sophia had slipped away to curl up in her old bed beneath a comforter, removing just her outer clothing and shoes. And Virgil, the exasperating one, had neither found a place to sleep in the house nor joined them at the kitchen table for a late-night whiskey but had chosen to wander about outside in the dim cold light of a quarter-moon.

“What d’you suppose Virgil is doing? Communicating with extra-terrestrials?”

They laughed, in scorn. Though uneasily.

(Swallowing whiskey that burned wonderfully as it passed down her throat and into the region of her heart Beverly wondered: Who knew? Their brother resembled an extra-terrestrial himself!)

(Thinking of, what was it, a movie she’d seen as a teenager—The Man Who Fell to Earth? Eerie-eyed, epicene David Bowie as an extra-terrestrial being with some sort of doomed plan for—whatever, she’d forgotten, or had found too confusing at the time to comprehend.)

“I can’t figure out where he sleeps. Maybe in the basement, on the sofa.”

“His old room…”

“He avoids that. He said.”

“Why?”

“Christ, who knows why. Ask Virgil.”

“I find my old room comforting. I guess. Though it’s strange to wake up in the morning and realize—like a ton of bricks it hits you—I’m not a kid any longer, I have kids.”

“Jesus! Yes.”

“Remember, at school, kids would ask us if we were Catholic?—five kids.”

“That isn’t such a lot…”

“It is. At our school it’s getting to be unusual if there are two siblings in a family, let alone five.”

To make her point, Lorene paused. Beverly bristled knowing you were supposed to think More than two siblings, lower-class. Could be black, Hispanic, poor-white but bottom-line, uneducated.

She and Steve had more than two children, in fact more than three children, which Lorene knew. But damn if she’d let her sister rile her at this hour, she would not.

“Mom used to say, very pleasantly, in that way of hers that’s dignified—‘No, we are not Catholics. We just like children.’”

“We’re the largest family on Old Farm Road…”

“Mostly everyone else here is old. Our neighbors haven’t had children at home for years.”

“Well, Mom and Dad don’t have children ‘at home’ now either. Though I don’t think of them as old.”

Thinking of poor Whitey. Fact was, since the stroke, Whitey was indeed looking old.

“Still, it’s pretty clear that Sophia was an accident.”

“And Virgil.”

In the way of older siblings secure in the belief that they were wanted by their parents they laughed together conspiratorially.

“Virgil’s more than an accident, he’s an aberration.”

“What’s it called?—mutation…”

“Poor Mom! You ever get the feeling, Daddy blames her for how Virgil turned out?”

“Daddy does not. What a—an inappropriate thing to say. Daddy would never blame Mom for anything she did or—didn’t do.”

“He didn’t want her to work, though.”

“He never said she couldn’t—I’m sure.”

“Well. Mom had wanted to teach, she has a degree in education and was taking graduate courses in something fancy like ‘comp lit’…”

“Taking care of Daddy is a full-time occupation. Not to mention five children and this house.”

“Everyone envied us, our ‘perfect’ mom.”

“I think Mom is perfect.”

“A perfect ‘mom’—yes. No question.”

Lapsing into silence then as Thom splashed more of the amber liquid into their glasses, and they drank.

“Hi, Dad.”

Shyly he spoke. He had yet to become accustomed to approaching his father in bed.

(Had he ever? Even as a young child? Been invited to approach his father in bed?)

(The parents’ bedroom, off-limits. Even if Virgil had wished to explore that part of the house he would not have dared. No!)

(Though now, as an adult, visiting Mom, he might wander anywhere in the house he wished, his mother would neither know nor care, outside in her garden, or in another part of the house oblivious of what Virgil was up to. You know, I trust you.)

(But Jessalyn would never say to any of them, You know, I trust you. For it was understood that their mother loved them and trusted them in all things.)

“It’s Virgil, Dad. Hi.”

So awkward! His tongue felt swollen in his mouth.

So strange to approach his father in bed and to come so close. For in life, Virgil and Whitey would not ever find themselves so close.

In normal circumstances Whitey would draw away from Virgil half-consciously. In normal circumstances, Virgil would keep a discreet distance from Whitey. All this was accomplished without conscious negotiation, awareness. (How many inches, minimum? Twelve, twenty?) No handshake, no hearty hug.

But these were not normal circumstances of course. In a hospital there are no normal circumstances. Virgil had noted, with alarm, how the floor of a hospital room is susceptible to sudden shiftings, disorientations. You believe that you are standing upright until you are not.

On the hospital stairs more than once he’d been just slightly dazed, dizzied. Avoiding the elevator though (he knew) the others were annoyed by him, eccentric behavior, yes but no behavior is actually eccentric but rather purposeful. How’d he tell them, who disliked him anyway, that he did not want to crowd into an elevator with them, breathing their exhaled breaths, pressing close, Thom, Beverly, Lorene, even Sophia, even Jessalyn, no thank you.

Elevator claustrophobia is just family life, condensed. To the size of an elevator.

He’d brought his flute. Without the flute, what would he do with his hands? What would he do?

In the cranked-up hospital bed the sixty-seven-year-old patient was neither obviously asleep nor was he obviously awake. He was neither obviously aware of his visitor seated uneasily near him nor was he unaware. His ravaged face was ruddier than Virgil recalled, and his eyelids quivered almost continuously as if he were debating, arguing with himself. His mouth too quivered, damp with spittle. Almost you might think that he was about to speak at any moment as it seemed that, at any moment, the not-quite-focused right eye would sharpen to attention, and see.

Clearly, some violence had been done to this man’s head. His thinning gray hair had been shaved unevenly, exposing his pale, mottled scalp.

Beefy arms, stippled with bruises and mysterious wounds like infected insect bites. What Virgil could see of his father’s torso, fatty-muscled, gray-grizzly-haired, inside the loose-fitting white hospital gown, this too was stippled with the mysterious wounds though they were less evident here, or had begun to fade. Virgil did not want to think of how a catheter was draining urine from his father’s body in a slow stream into a plastic container beneath his bed even as the IV dripped liquids into his veins as in some bizarre Rube Goldberg machinery meant to make you smile at—what?—the vanity of human existence, or its ingenuity?

Or, desperation.

Please don’t die, Daddy. Not yet.

Too many flowers in this room. Heavy, potted mums and dyed-looking hydrangea on the windowsill. Fruit baskets covered with crackling cellophane no one had yet unwrapped. Get well cards. Please, no.

Yet more bizarrely, well-wishers had brought gifts for the “convalescent”—hardcover books of the kind (The Butterfly Effect: How Your Life Matters; Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking; A Brief History of the Universe) Whitey McClaren was always reading, or trying to read. It seemed to Virgil particularly ironic that such books were brought to the stroke-victim who would have difficulty learning to “read” again in the most elementary way.

On the wall just inside the door, the hand-sanitizer. All medical workers, all visitors, were instructed to sanitize their hands whenever entering the room.

The first time he’d entered his father’s room in Intensive Care, Virgil had been instructed (by Sophia) to sanitize his hands—“Here, Virgil. Always remember!”

In his distracted state at the time he’d scarcely noticed the sanitizer. It was like Virgil to think, not entirely consciously, that routine behavior prescribed for others was not inevitably prescribed for him.

Yet, he’d washed his hands briskly in the disinfectant. He’d felt like a boy washing his hands to please his mother—a boy again—and in that way safe.

But only in that way. And so, not really safe.

“Remember, Virgil. Each time.”

Looking anxious, Sophia had made a gesture with her hands as if washing them. Virgil had nodded—Of course.

Now drawing a deep breath. Lifting the flute to his lips. Positioning his fingers, and beginning to play.

Earnest, breathy notes—so airy, you couldn’t define them as flute-sounds. (In fact, the instrument was Virgil’s approximation of a flute, carved by him from elderberry wood.)

Virgil had tried to explain to his family, it wasn’t conventional music he wanted to play for his stricken father, or not music exactly, but something else, a communication special to Whitey from him, from Virgil, for he feared that actual music would be too complicated for the stroke victim to absorb like a damaged eye confronted with too much stimuli.

Something like a prayer—his prayer for Whitey.

Jessalyn had seen to it that Virgil had time alone with his father each morning. The others had resented him, perhaps. But Jessalyn had held firm; she knew that Virgil would be shunted aside by his older siblings, and would never dare assert himself to their father. For this Virgil was grateful to his mother—for this, and so much more!—but uneasy too for intimacy made all transactions too significant, too important, intimacy is always close-up. He felt most comfortable at a little distance.

It was he who’d pushed Sabine from him. Not Sabine who’d pushed him. Though, physically, literally you might’ve interpreted it otherwise, as (possibly, though not probably) Sabine might feel free to interpret it. If.

These thoughts went through his head, as he played the flute for Whitey. His tongue still felt swollen, and his fingers felt awkward, yet the flute-sounds were beautiful (in Virgil’s ears at least) and (he thought) were making an impression on the stricken man, whose bruised eyelids fluttered with a new urgency, and whose lips seemed to be straining to speak even as, with his (bruised, wound-stippled) left hand, very slowly, with what appeared to be enormous effort, he reached toward Virgil, lacking the (evident) strength to lift his hand but pushing it along the bed, and spreading his fingers as Virgil had not seen him spread his fingers since the stroke, and his mouth moved as if in a spasm, and to his astonishment Virgil heard “Vir-gil”—unmistakably, the first coherent word Whitey McClaren had uttered in these several days in the hospital.

Vir-gil.

Virgil stared at his father, transfixed. He was not certain that he’d heard what he had heard. The flute slipped through his fingers and clattered to the floor.

Then, he burst into tears.

The Return of Whitey

“H’yeh.”

All he could manage for now. But smiling with half his face and his (bloodshot, tearful) left eye clear and in focus and seeing.

For this, they rejoiced. That left eye seeing.

And he could move his head—he could nod. With some calculation, deliberation, intensity—nod.

And he could move—(not exactly “use”)—his left hand almost normally or (maybe) almost almost-normally and nothing was more thrilling to them than to approach his room, and enter the room, taking deep breaths before entering in anticipation or in apprehension of what they might see (for each visit was both a re-visit and an entirely new, terrifyingly new visit) but there he was, their Whitey, almost-again-Whitey, sitting up now in the cranked-up bed, pillows behind his back, head lifted of its own (seeming) volition, (some degree of) muscular coordination restored, that “alertness” of being we take for granted in ourselves and others, that constitutes “life”—“livingness”—“sentience”; most wonderfully, to arrive with no expectation at all to see how with the assistance of a nurse’s aide Whitey is holding, or seems to be holding, in his tremulous left hand, a small container of orange juice, and is sucking liquid through a straw.

Unfathomable to calculate the effort of (firing) brain neurons, coordination of myriad nerves in the left arm and hand, muscle and tissue, bone-joints, each required in tandem with the others to produce sucking liquid through a straw.

SHE KISSES HIM, she weeps with relief.

With the terrible strain of relief, that feels like blinding light in a dark-adapted eye.

The Blessing Stopped

Thom determined: his father didn’t remember what happened to him that day. Didn’t remember the stroke and didn’t remember what preceded the stroke and what followed the stroke. When he’d awakened in the hospital, in this room and in this bed, hearing Virgil’s flute, he’d been utterly baffled, astonished—How’d the hell he get here? Though at the time lacking the ability to express this astonishment.

Only after he was told that he’d been returning home from a trustees’ luncheon at the library when he was stricken did Whitey seem to think yes, he did remember—something.

“The library, Dad? You remember—you had a meeting?”

Nodding yes. But not with certainty. So that Thom was inclined to think that his father was really remembering another, previous meeting at the library, not the last meeting, shortly before his stroke.

The Hammond Public Library trustees had luncheon meetings every other month. Very likely, Whitey was conflating these.

Whitey’s long-term memory had not been seriously affected by the stroke, so far as anyone could determine: he recognized faces, he seemed to know names, he’d been made to understand where he was, in Hammond General. But he seemed to have no memory for events that must have occurred just before the stroke, like getting into his car, driving on the Hennicott Expressway, braking to a stop…

Whitey didn’t remember a “stroke”—of course. All he could say when asked what he did remember was a stuttering syllable—“B-B-Bl’k.”

“‘Black,’ Dad?”

“Yy. B-B-Bl’k.”

Whitey’s good, left eye awash with tears his family interpreted as tears of triumph, that he was able at last to speak to them.

Not in the presence of his family, nor within hearing of any of the medical staff, Thom asked Whitey if he remembered Hammond police officers? Possibly being flagged down for a traffic stop?

No. He did not.

A police siren? Police cruiser pulling up behind him, beside him?

No. He did not.

Pulling off the Expressway, braking his car on the shoulder of the road…

No. He did not.

If Whitey wondered why Thom was asking these questions he gave no sign. He’d become, since the stroke, not only slow-speaking but slow to become impatient, even curious. The old Whitey would’ve asked why the hell was Thom asking him these questions about cops but the new, post-stroke Whitey exuded an air of childlike trust and infinite patience.

You had the feeling (Thom thought) that the poor man was begging Please don’t abandon me. I don’t know how to answer you but I am still Whitey, please don’t abandon me.

Often it wasn’t clear if Whitey was actually hearing, or comprehending, what was being said to him. But he’d learned to smile with half his mouth, eagerly. He’d learned to nod his head in an arc of an inch or two—Yes.

Or—no.

As, in the prime of his life, Whitey McClaren had never acknowledged being sick if he could avoid it. Severe colds, flu, bronchitis and even, one winter, ambulatory pneumonia and a high fever. His stoicism was bound up with masculine pride, vanity. Never show your enemies any weakness had been his mantra since high school football days.

His children had laughed at their father, Whitey was so stiff-backed about what people thought of him. Macho vanity, the girls thought it. But loved him anyway.

Thom understood. Of course. A man doesn’t show his weakness to other men.

What Virgil thought, Thom didn’t know and didn’t care to know.

Several times Thom had spoken with doctors in the hospital about his father’s mysterious wounds. He was deeply suspicious that these were wounds consistent with stun-gun shots which meant that his sixty-seven-year-old father might have been hit with charges as high as fifty thousand volts of electricity!—enough to fell a heavyset man in the prime of life.

Enough to fell a steer, before slaughter.

But the wounds were fading amid myriad bruises precipitated by frequent blood work and anti-coagulant medication. Except for the pictures Thom had taken on his cell phone, which would be difficult to substantiate. The Hammond PD claimed to have no record of John Earle McClaren being stopped by law enforcement officers on October 18.

The family was vastly relieved that Whitey was better, and improving daily. Wasn’t that all that mattered? If he didn’t recall what had happened to him, wasn’t that a blessing? After five days on the critical list he’d been transferred from Intensive Care to Telemetry, and was scheduled to be transferred directly from Telemetry to a rehabilitation clinic at University of Rochester Medical Center, possibly as soon as the following week. All this was very good news.

Exhausted by the hospital vigil Thom had not mentioned his suspicions to anyone in the family. He’d held off contacting a lawyer. Whitey seemed to have been hospitalized already for weeks rather than days and the ordeal—the vigil—had not yet ended. Perhaps it would never entirely end.

Thom had not encouraged his wife to drive to Hammond, to visit her father-in-law. The more visitors Whitey had, the more distracting and exhausting it was. Thom was eager to return to some semblance of his own life in Rochester; he’d tried to keep up with work at the publishing house by way of telephone calls, emails. He had a reliable assistant. But he was eager to return, for there was much that had to be overseen by him, in person.

Possibly, best to let his suspicions go, for now. Since Whitey was going to be all right.

For maybe Thom was mistaken after all. He had not been thinking clearly for some time. Possibly, Whitey had somehow banged himself up as his vehicle lurched to a stop. He’d struck his face against the steering wheel, the windshield. He’d climbed out of the car and collapsed and cut his face on gravel.

This Thom knew: Whitey would be very reluctant to initiate any sort of adversarial claim against the Hammond PD for he’d been proud of his relationship with the police when he’d been mayor. He had invariably taken the side of the police in disputes with citizens even when (as Thom recalled) it was likely to assume that police officers had committed misconduct and had violated the civil rights of civilians.

They have a tough job. Out there making split decisions. Could cost them their lives. Not good to second-guess our brave law enforcement officers.

These were Whitey’s words, precisely. And that grim truculent look of Whitey’s. In the parlance of politics, doubling-down.

You took a public position, and dug in your heels. You took a position that drew strength to you, from the strength of an ally whom you would protect and defend whether he deserved it or not just as, one day, quid pro quo, your ally would protect and defend you whether you deserved it or not.

The Steady Hand

“Sophia! You have the steady hand.”

Praise in the form of a jest. Or has it been a jest in the form of praise.

Praise and jest commingled, in a kind of caress.

Though it is indisputably true. Everyone in the lab would agree. Of Alistair Means’s several skilled and trusted assistants at the Memorial Park Research Institute it is Sophia McClaren who displays the steadiest hand in the laboratory: injecting the tiny rodents, decapitating the tiny rodents, dissecting the tiny rodents.

AND YOU HAVE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL HANDS, Sophia. But you know this.

You, the young unmarried and (so far as one can guess) unattached female research assistant whom I single out for the sort of praise no one can—quite—decode: (frankly sexual) (congenial, friendly though also sexual) (congenial, friendly and not sexual at all) (each of these) (none of these).

BRAINS REMOVED FROM TINY SKULLS, examined under microscopes. Exquisite tiny organs “harvested”—“isolated”—rendered as “data.”

All that is, is rendered to “data.”

What is not “data,” is not.

Fiercely proud, wants to be proud, Sophia McClaren has the steadiest hand.

And yes, it is a beautiful hand—long slender fingers, nails always very clean, unpolished and evenly filed.

She is aware of him observing her. His eyes moving on her, and lingering. And that sensation of excited warmth that rises in her, from the pit of her stomach into the region of her heart, when he speaks to her, when he is kind to her, asking after the family emergency that had kept her out of the lab for nearly a week.

Quickly she tells him the emergency is over. The crisis. The hospital vigil.

One of her parents?—he asks.

She hesitates before telling him yes, her father.

“But he’s better now?”

“Yes. Better now.”

There is a pause. It is up to Sophia (she supposes) to supply more information.

But she doesn’t want to utter the word stroke. For then she will be obliged to provide further information—hemorrhagic stroke, aphasia, partial paralysis.

He says, awkwardly, “Well. If you need anything…” Pausing as if he has no idea what to say next.

Sometimes, his manner with his assistants is brusque, jocular. Not conversation but banter quick, deft and of no more significance than a swift Ping-Pong volley, to get talking out of the way, before settling into the day’s serious business.

But now, Means is hesitant, regarding Sophia. He has noticed the bruise-like shadows around her eyes, the pallor of her skin, a frantic elation in her voice. Oh yes! Better now. We are all—so relieved.

It is not like him to stand so close beside her. As if unaware (is he?) of what he is doing.

Sophia shifts her position, just slightly. She feels that sensation of excited warmth another time.

She hears herself tell her supervisor that she is very grateful to be back. She has missed the lab, she has missed their work.

Not wanting to say—I missed you! I miss the person I become, in your presence.

“Exactitude. That’s what we miss, when we are out of the lab and in the ‘world.’”

His Scots accent is faint but unmistakable though he has lived in the United States for many years.

“‘Exactitude.’ Yes.”

Sophia has never heard any scientist speak in quite this way. But it is true, Means has named it. Exactitude—the precision of assembling evidence, methodically accruing “data”—what is missing in life, in what’s called the world.

Another time Means asks Sophia if he can be of help, somehow. If (for instance) she needs anyone to drive her—anywhere…

“Thank you. But I guess—no. I have my own car…”

It is the most insipid statement. Sophia has no idea what she is saying.

Suddenly, they are very awkward with each other. They are not quite able to look at each other. Means bares his teeth in a fleeting smile as he turns away with a wave of his hand.

It is an extraordinary exchange, in these circumstances. Yet, it is ordinary, banal. Sophia must not make too much of it.

She is weak with relief, that something terrible has not happened—yet. Exhausted from nights of half-sleep and suffused with gratitude for her good fortune that includes now Alistair Means’s kindness to her at this fraught time Sophia thinks—I will love him. This man.

OUR YOUNGEST DAUGHTER SOPHIA, she’s a Ph.D. research scientist at Memorial Park, on an A-list team working on a cure for cancer. Jesus, we’re proud of her!

She has overheard her father boasting shamelessly of her. She has wanted to laugh, and she has wanted to press her hands over her ears and run away.

Of course Whitey has exaggerated her position at the Institute. He has exaggerated (Sophia has always thought) all of his children’s accomplishments (except Virgil’s, of which he seems scarcely aware). You would almost think that John Earle McClaren looks at his family, his “offspring,” with something like astonishment. These are—mine. How has this happened?

True, Sophia McClaren is one of a team of researchers involved in a massive experiment but she is only an assistant to the principal investigator, one who follows instructions and not (yet) one who helps devise the highly complicated science.

Smartest of the kids and hardest-working but I worry about Sophia, she takes after her mother, believes the best of everyone and is too trusting, doesn’t know the first thing about protecting herself.

Hearing this Sophia wanted to protest, that is not true! She is plenty protective of herself, she believes. In ways her dear unsuspecting parents could never guess.

She has never allowed herself to fall in love, for instance. The very cliché—fall in love—brings a smile to her lips.

She has never allowed herself to become too close to another person, beyond her family.

Friends from high school have drifted off. Perhaps it has been Sophia’s fault, perhaps not. Most of them have married, have become mothers. It is enough Sophia can do, to muster up interest in, affection for, her nieces and nephews, her parents’ grandchildren of whom she (sometimes) feels rivalry, just a little, observing her parents with them; she has no interest at all in her friends’ children. How boring, babies! Nor are Sophia’s girl-cousins with whom she’d been friendly through adolescence of much interest to her now that she has embarked upon a career in science.

To these cousins, Sophia’s seriousness and sobriety are boring.

Yet she has always sought the admiration of others. Especially, she has sought the admiration and approval of her parents. Their unquestioning love for her has kept her young, she thinks. Perhaps too young.

Though she is no longer a girl, she is still a daughter.

It is a relief to Sophia, the McClarens have no idea what her research actually involves. Nor do they understand that Sophia has deferred her Ph.D. (at Cornell) in order to work in a laboratory funded by a pharmaceutical company.

Maybe this is a mistake, Sophia isn’t sure. Deferring her adult life, in a sense. Always she has been the very best student, the most valued intern, the “indispensable” assistant. It is a role that fits her tight as a glove. At twenty-eight she could easily be mistaken for twenty, or eighteen. Emotionally, she isn’t so much young as untried, untested.

But Alistair Means has made it clear that he has a very high opinion of her.

Sophia has fallen under the spell of the Lumex project. Her own dissertation project at Cornell is overly theoretical, she thinks. Her own research, her own ideas, are not so attractive to her as those of others with more authority, in truth she is frightened (a little) at the possibility of being mistaken, squandering months and years of her life on a project of her own devising that might very well (for this is the nature of science!) come to nothing. The Lumex project is here, now. Seeking a cure for cancer. Specific kinds of cancers.

She can live in Hammond, within a few miles of the house on Old Farm Road.

In Ithaca, at the edge of the vast Cornell campus, she’d felt lonely, isolated. There, her work had not seemed sufficient to her, to give meaning to her life.

So badly Sophia wants these experiments to yield results! Powerful chemical compounds that will shrink cancerous growths, or kill cancerous cells before they take root. Drugs to counter the injurious effects of cancer chemotherapy. Cancer treatments customized to individual cancers…

Whitey’s pride in her will be confirmed, one day. She is willing to wait a long time.

It is a relief, how each day Whitey is improving. He has regained (almost) the use of his left hand and he is regaining (by degrees) the ability to speak. He can make his (labored, valiant) way now, with assistance, into the bathroom close by his bedroom, though his right leg yet dangles useless, like his right arm. Next week he will be transferred to the Stroke Center at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Haltingly he speaks. With much difficulty he speaks. Spittle on his lips, an effort of heart-straining valor as he tries to move his (paralyzed) right arm hanging limp onto the bedclothes.

“…c’pse am. J’s h’ngs t’ere.”

Of the observers only Sophia can decipher her father’s words:

“‘Corpse arm. Just hangs there.’”

Whitey does not seem disconsolate, uttering these attempts at words. More, his battered face conveys an air of genial resignation.

The McClaren children have returned to their own lives. Thom has returned to his family and work in Rochester and keeps in close contact with Jessalyn. Lorene and Sophia have returned to work and drop by the hospital each evening. Jessalyn is always there, at Whitey’s bedside, and Beverly is often with her. At unpredictable times Virgil shows up, to play his flute which Whitey quite likes.

No one is sleeping over at the house on Old Farm Road now. Though Beverly has offered to stay with her Jessalyn has insisted that she return home to her own family at night.

Family emergency Sophia called it. Explaining why she’d had to be away from the lab for what has seemed a very long time and not only a few days.

Indeed it is something of a shock, to return. Driving the interstate in another direction, north and not south into downtown Hammond. Stepping out of bright October sunshine into the fluorescent-lit interior of the research lab where no ventilator is powerful enough to entirely carry away the sour smells of bodily wastes, animal misery and terror, death.

It is a morning of decapitation and dissection to which she has returned. A test for Sophia’s steady hand which she does not intend to fail.

Walls of cages. Timorous, shivering little rodents. Nervous chatter. Some of the specimens are bloated and hairless, some are anorexic, shriveled. Some appear to be robust, even manic. Most others are enervated. The tiny bodies of some are riddled with tumors that may have shrunken, or may not have shrunken. All to be discovered that very day, and rendered into “data.”

Tiny rodents, injected with diverse strains of cancerous cells. In stages, following a complex algorithm devised by Alistair Means, the rodents are injected with “anti-cancerous” pharmaceutical compounds and, in time, in carefully calibrated stages, dissected to determine if the cancerous tumors riddling their tiny bodies have shrunk. If there are side effects—(of course, there are side effects)—these are duly noted. The Lumex project has been a highly complicated sequence of overlapping experiments involving thousands of laboratory animals over the years, in process long before Sophia McClaren was hired as an assistant.

Slipping on latex gloves. Tight-tight, can’t breathe, the glove that is your life, you learn to breathe inside it.

Some of the mice are decapitated with a small, razor-sharp device. (Sophia wonders who was the inventor of such a device. Who patented the ingenious guillotine, who manufactures and profits from it.) Most are dispatched with a lethal injection from a very thin needle.

Strange, the tiny creature scarcely resists. It is a consequence of the steady hand, perhaps.

In the experimental lab, precision is the highest form of mercy.

A swift injection into the belly. A final spasm, final squeak, lifeless.

Now, the scalpel…

Her work is thrilling to her. At least, it is thrilling to perceive from a little distance. The end does justify the means. You must believe this.

Consider the battery of drugs involved in her father’s post-stroke treatment. All of these drugs, FDA approved, had to be tested initially on animals. Induced strokes in primates (marmosets, monkeys) from pinpoint to massive. Anti-coagulants, coagulants.

Psychosurgery: incisions in primate brains, removal of parts of brains, halving of brains. Induced paralysis, spinal cords severed. Can a mutilated brain “repair itself”? Can brain cells undergo “neurogenesis”?

It is now forbidden by United States law to experiment on living persons without their consent. Though in the past researchers often conducted such experiments among captive subjects in prisons, orphanages, mental hospitals. Especially vulnerable were mentally ill or developmentally challenged persons whose families gave researchers permission out of naivete or desperation.

Sophia McClaren would never have participated in such experiments, had she been a young scientist in those years. She wants to think so.

Proud of you, honey. Such important work you are doing.

Sophia’s eyes fill with tears of gratitude. Tight-gloved hands unfaltering as the tiny creatures spasm and die between her fingers and the smell of their small deaths lifts to her nostrils.

“SOPHIA?”—THE VOICE IS LOWERED, unexpectedly close.

She glances around, startled. Feels a flush of heat in her face. How long has Alistair Means been standing there just a few feet away, why has he approached her so quietly…

“Excuse me. I’d like to check your data, if I may.”

“Yes! Of course.”

She stands aside. She watches his fingers move rapidly over the keyboard. His concentration shifts to the computer screen, he leans forward, frowning.

It is late afternoon. Hours have passed swiftly, Sophia is scarcely conscious of how tired she has become.

So many miniature death-spasms on this utilitarian counter-top, so many miniature tumorous organs “harvested.” Her eyes ache from squinting. Her head aches from the strain of leaning forward to record data on the computer, hunching her shoulders.

Whatever Dr. Means sees on the computer screen, he is (at least tentatively) pleased.

“Thank you, Sophia.”

He does not always call his assistants by their first names, Sophia has noticed.

His way of enunciating her name—Soph-i-a. She wants to think this is a tender sound.

Means is not like other men Sophia has known, at the Institute and elsewhere. Men who make it clear that they are attracted to her and who (therefore) exert pressure on her, however obliquely, however genially, to respond to their interest in her.

She cannot decode Alistair Means. Perhaps it is entirely her imagination, his “interest” in her. Perhaps it is entirely unconscious on his part, and he has no idea how frequently, in Sophia’s presence, he seems to be staring at her. In her more subdued emotional mood she cannot decide if she is truly attracted to the man, or feels nothing more for him than admiration for his intelligence, his reputation, and his zeal as a scientist. Perhaps she feels a subordinate’s ignoble hope of advancing her career, through him. She isn’t sure, even, that she trusts him.

It is believed that Alistair Means is a “brilliant” research scientist. Yet, to his staff at the Institute, Means is something of a riddle.

At times he is friendly, affable. At other times, brusque to the point of rudeness. He is gentlemanly, courteous, patient, kind. He is not at all patient—his fingers drum with irritation when you try to speak to him. He is stiffly formal, and rarely smiles. Oh yes he will smile—when you don’t expect it.

He is generous with young scientists. He is (sometimes) not-so-generous with his colleagues.

He has an eye for women. He rarely notices women!

But here is an uncontested fact: Alistair Means arrives each weekday morning at the Institute in a sport coat, a white shirt, a necktie; not once has he been glimpsed in jeans or khakis or any sort of casual attire. Perversely, he never wears dress shoes, only just a pair of badly worn moccasins or a pair of badly worn running shoes. With white socks.

In the lab, he wears a clinician’s white cord coat. He goes through a box of latex gloves within a few days. Indeed, Dr. Means has a medical degree though he has never practiced medicine; his Ph.D., in molecular biology, is from Harvard.

He has published more than three hundred papers in his highly specialized field, Sophia has learned. He has been a mentor to a number of young scientists scattered across the country at the most distinguished research centers.

He has also been known to “terminate” young scientists and staff members, without explanation.

Or maybe—(for this is all conjecture)—these are rumors circulated by those who were terminated with good cause, and are embittered.

Alistair Means is in his early forties but looks older. His thick, wavy, steel-colored hair has begun to recede from his forehead and there are distinct lines, like opening crevices, in his cheeks; his jaws are covered in a short-trimmed beard much grayer than his hair. His posture is very straight, perhaps because he is not a tall man. Out of a kind of aggressive courtliness he behaves like a man of another, earlier era: he was born in Edinburgh and was brought with his family to the United States as an adolescent. His accent is faint but unmistakable though he has lived in the United States for more than thirty years.

That slurred, melodic accent!—how subtle an accent is. Sophia finds herself entranced by the peculiar music of her supervisor’s speech, quite apart from what he is saying.

Before Memorial Park, Means taught molecular biology at Columbia and Rockefeller University; for the past seven years he has headed the Memorial Park Research Institute, which has received millions of dollars of funding under his auspices, much of it from pharmaceutical companies like Lumex, Inc. The rumor is, despite a very high salary Means is absurdly frugal: he drives a not-new Honda Civic, he lives in a single-bedroom condominium in an undistinguished neighborhood in North Hammond. Sometimes, he even bicycles to work, a distance of nine miles.

When Sophia was new to the lab Alistair Means had seemed at times scarcely to know who she was. (Though he’d hired her himself.) She’d been conditioned not to smile at her supervisor and not to say Good morning, Dr. Means!—for he seemed startled by such effrontery from his staff and rarely responded in kind.

Is he married? Was he married? In any case it is rumored that Means is estranged from his wife/ex-wife and his (near-grown) children who live in a distant city. He has never been seen frequently with any woman, at the Institute at least. If he has male friends, he is rarely seen with them; his closest associates are his post-docs, who are all male, youthful heirs.

Sophia has encountered her supervisor on the grounds of the Institute, where he is likely to be walking alone, staring at the ground before him distracted and frowning, lost in thought and oblivious of his surroundings. Sometimes, he stops to take notes. Sophia has been surprised to see him bicycling along the highway, against traffic—not on a battered bicycle like Virgil but on an English racer.

She has watched him, and felt a wave of tenderness for a man who seems so alone, unaware even of his aloneness.

What is he thinking about? she wonders. His work, his life? His family?

But Alistair Means has no family, has he?—Sophia thinks this must be so.

Smiling to think—But I have more than enough family, for two!

NEXT DAY, AT HAMMOND GENERAL, visiting Whitey, seeing a white-coated older doctor making his rounds, she finds herself thinking of Alistair Means.

It is the first time she has thought of Alistair Means outside the Institute.

Is this a good sign, or not such a good sign? Sophia does not want the stress of more hope in her life.

Tempted to confide in her mother that she has met a man, at the Institute, in whom she is “interested”—but no, that would be a mistake, for Jessalyn would be too happy for her and really there isn’t likely to be any future in Alistair Means.

In recent years Sophia has become such a solitary person, the idea of love blossoms in her imagination as it could not in actual life. Takes root, emerges, blossoms and effloresces. Petals fall to the ground, bruised.

Her actual encounters with men have been awkward. She is all elbows, almost literally. A man’s mouth on hers—her breath is sucked away. She feels a rush of excitement but simultaneously a counter-rush like the palm of a hand pushing against her chest, hard. She laughs inappropriately, and too loudly.

Her unease in her body seems to have begun when she was ten or eleven, keenly aware of slightly older girls, her older sisters.

Am I expected to look like—that? My God.

To the neutral eye Sophia McClaren is poised, thoughtful. She smiles readily, she is as gracious as her mother Jessalyn McClaren, whom she superficially resembles.

Is she considered a beautiful young woman, or—not-so-beautiful? She is very vain—her mirror-reflection makes her wince for it is not how she wishes to appear. She is shy to see herself. Her eyes are too large, and set too deep in their sockets—her expression is stark, startled, owl-like, yearning. Her hair is stiff with static electricity, the hue of something burnt. Her hands move nervously like laboratory creatures that climb over one another in desperation. Her clothes swim on her slender body, a size or two too large. Yet, she is detached, distant. Irony numbs her like Novocain.

Oh, impossible! If a man’s eyes move onto her, Sophia wants to hide her face.

Better yet, stick out her tongue. Don’t look at me! Please.

She knows, Jessalyn is concerned for her. All the old, tiresome clichés, the concern of a mother that her daughter find a companion, or a lover; be found by a companion, a lover; marry, have children, perpetrate the race—these clichés live and thrive in Jessalyn McClaren, like germs in a petri dish.

Mom!—I think I am falling in love.

But no. Ridiculous. She is not a schoolgirl.

Besides, all talk among the McClarens is of Whitey’s condition. His transfer to a rehabilitation clinic in Rochester which is scheduled for Tuesday of the following week. His therapy will mean a massive overhauling of Jessalyn’s life. Weeks that Whitey will be a patient in the clinic in Rochester, followed by weeks—months—when Whitey will be an outpatient. So long as Whitey is in the clinic, Jessalyn will stay with Thom and his family; the clinic is only four miles from their house. When Whitey returns home, Jessalyn will be his primary caretaker. She has been online learning about the post-stroke therapy he will be prescribed, which is grueling and relentless but (almost) guaranteed to “work miracles.” She is planning to take a training course at the local community college—Life after Stroke: A Learner’s Manual. It is the most enthusiastic Jessalyn’s children have seen her in recent memory.

“Mom, you should have been a nurse!”—Beverly said, marveling; but Sophia said, reprovingly, “No. Mom should have been a doctor.”

Whitey has visitors, a steady stream of visitors, now that he is off the hospital’s critical list. His room is filled with flowers, gift baskets, books, even crudely cute stuffed animals, every surface taken, parts of the floor. Those nurses who had not known that John Earle McClaren had once been mayor of Hammond have begun to see that their “Mr. McClaren”—“Whitey”—is a very popular man.

(“Before your father is discharged maybe I could have his autograph?”—one of the nurses asks Sophia.)

It’s a relief for the McClaren children to be returning to some semblance of normal life. Only Jessalyn is at the hospital from morning to night; the others drop by when they can, or telephone. Sophia is annoyed that, whenever she visits, Beverly is always there; she even eats with Whitey and Jessalyn, for visitors can arrange to buy meals. Gaily Beverly says, “Steve is accusing me of ‘abandoning’ my family—as if he’d ever noticed me when I was at his beck and call.”

Does Beverly really not like her husband?—Sophia wonders. Loves him, but doesn’t much like him? Resents him? And does not seem to trust him. Why are some marriages so strange?

She has not thought that she wants to be married. Even her fantasies of Alistair Means do not include marriage. She would not want to marry a man less devoted to her than Whitey is to Jessalyn; yet frankly, she would not be capable of being so devoted to any man as Jessalyn is to Whitey.

In sickness and in health. In death do us part.

But wait, this doesn’t sound right. At death do us part?

To death—do us part?

It is the most extraordinary of vows. Who in her right mind could conceive of such an extravagant promise…

Like squeezing into a sleeping bag with another person, and zipping the bag up. Forever!

So long as Sophia has her parents to love her, she doesn’t really need the love of another person. No lover, no husband, could compete with Jessalyn and Whitey who ask so little of her, only just that she remain their daughter.

A silken cord, of a kind. So wonderful to have a family close-knit as theirs! She’d said to Virgil, “We don’t actually have to grow up. We are spared having to start families of our own.”

Virgil didn’t think this was funny. A prim Virgil-face and scolding words.

“Well. Mom and Dad won’t be around forever.”

“‘Forever’ is a long time, Virgil. I don’t plan ahead that far.”

Recklessly Sophia spoke, as if her profligate words were untrue.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON AT 5:00 P.M. Alistair Means is giving a presentation at the Institute—“The Evolutionary Role of Mutations: A Theory.”

Everyone in the lab will be there of course. All of Means’s associates and staff. It is the first day of a three-day conference at the Institute and Alistair Means is one of the featured speakers.

Visiting professors, graduate students and post-docs have come to Memorial Park for the conference. There are papers on molecular biology, neuroscience, psychology. Sophia has never seen so many people streaming into the large auditorium in which Dr. Means will speak, that can accommodate five hundred.

He has invited Sophia to dinner after the lecture in the Institute dining room—“A dinner in my honor,” he has said. It is the first time that Alistair Means has invited Sophia anywhere.

She is conscious of the occasion. Its significance. (Maybe.)

She tells him she can’t come to the dinner. Then, seeing the look in the man’s face, of disappointment, and raw hurt, quickly she says that yes, she can come to the dinner but will have to leave early—“They will expect me at the hospital to see my father. If I can get there by eight-thirty…”

She feels a pang of guilt, she’d come late to the hospital the day before, also. Working late at the lab. But she has seen her father every evening this week.

So wonderful to Sophia, to hurry into Whitey’s room and to see his face light up at the sight of her. His mouth moving—S’phi.

Always, Jessalyn jumps up to hug her. Mother and daughter embrace tightly.

It is astonishing to Sophia, how she’d taken her father for granted, all of her life. At times, exasperated with him. Embarrassed by him. Daddy exaggerates so. Oh, I wish Daddy wouldn’t!

Now, it is so precious to her, to see that he is alive. To see that he recognizes her and can pronounce her name, or nearly—“S’phi.”

The previous day, she and Jessalyn helped Whitey walk in his room under the supervision of a therapist. Slow, painstaking-slow!—but Whitey is determined, he will regain the use of his legs.

He has been running a mild fever for the past day or two. His skin is flushed as if with excitement, hope. His eyes beam a faint yellow. His breath has a chemical smell.

So many drugs are dripping into his veins. Sophia has been keeping a precise medical log.

Jessalyn says the nurses have assured her, the fever is nothing to worry about. But of course, Jessalyn is worried.

Alistair Means’s subject—mutations, DNA, gene “editing”—is fascinating to Sophia, for her dissertation touches upon these. In her father’s hospital room she downloads articles on such subjects, one of them by Alistair Means, that appeared in Science a few months before. It is comfortable to use her laptop in the room even with the TV blaring overhead (poor Whitey craves news even when he has difficulty understanding it, the TV people speak so rapidly). Usually, Jessalyn watches TV with Whitey, or pretends to watch. Her eyelids droop with exhaustion but the look of severe strain and anxiety has mostly faded from her face.

The night before, Whitey signaled for Sophia to turn off the TV. With some effort he’d said to her what sounded like Wh’s d’ng—after several repeats Sophia deciphered this as “What are you doing?” She tried to explain, speaking slowly and clearly: Lumex, Inc. manufactures a drug that, taken within forty-eight hours of chemotherapy, mitigates some of its more severe side effects, like a plummeting of white blood platelets. This medication, which is a very complex chemical compound, and very expensive, the Institute lab is trying to improve, and Sophia is involved in the “trials.”

She doesn’t hesitate to speak of cancer to her father since (thank God) it isn’t cancer with which he has been stricken.

Whatever she’d told Whitey, he had seemed eager to hear. His way of straining forward, regarding her searchingly, reminds her of an infant’s intense staring at the adults who are leaning over it, trying to make sense of the mysterious sounds that erupt from their lips with such seeming ease and spontaneity.

But Sophia had been baffled by Ys, ys—wy. She’d looked to her mother who said, “Whitey is saying, ‘Yes, yes—why?’”

Why?—what? Sophia has no idea.

“WITHOUT MUTATIONS THERE IS NO EVOLUTION. Without random errors in DNA, there is no evolution. Yet most mutations in the DNA are harmful, and lead to dead ends—the inability of the life-form to reproduce itself.”

A paradox, Sophia thinks. The applicability to human life is all too obvious and yet, as Whitey would say—Why?

It is late Friday afternoon, in late October. Not yet 6:00 P.M., but the sky has darkened like a stain introduced into a clear solution. Amid the audience of several hundred in the Institute auditorium Sophia sits, second row center, with coworkers from the lab. She is listening intently to Alistair Means who speaks just a little too rapidly, his words sometimes lost in the Scots burr, as if he were thinking aloud, reasoning to himself in a manner both abstruse and excited. There is an argument here, in fact several arguments, theories posited to explain the connection between mutations and evolution—that is, between alterations in DNA and the success (or failure) with which organisms move their DNA into the next generation.

Sophia observes Alistair Means with the air of an attentive schoolgirl. It is her safest, most trustworthy pose: it leaves her mind free to ramble about, undetected.

He is too old for her. Of course.

Whitey would not approve.

Yet: she finds him attractive. Very.

The precision of his speech, the way in which he flails his hands about, as if he is thrilled with what he has discovered, and must suppress his excitement, to a degree. Here is exactitude, but also aliveness. Nothing is so sexually stirring to Sophia as an intelligent, rigorously intellectual person, who tells you things you would not have ever thought to tell yourself, in a way uniquely his own.

Too bad, Means’s sport coat looks rumpled. His necktie is of a neutral hue. The cuffs of his white shirt do not show beyond the cuffs of the sport coat. Sophia smiles to recall the many times that Jessalyn has stopped Whitey on the way out of the house, to straighten his tie, or suggest that he change his shirt, or put on another pair of shoes.

Jesus, Jessy! What would I do without you.

Sophia wonders if Alistair Means would be grateful. It is very hard to imagine tugging at this man’s sleeve, suggesting that he change a tie or a shirt.

Sophia glances about, to see how others regard the distinguished man. She wonders if there is another woman in the audience who feels for Alistair Means something more than intellectual admiration.

(There are not many women at the Institute. Less than 10 percent and of these, most are junior appointments.)

In any case individuals at the Institute who might be romantically involved with one another would do their best to keep their relationships secret. For a supervisor to be involved with an assistant would be unprofessional, and risky.

She, Sophia, clearly feels something for Alistair Means, or for the occasion, for she is wearing dressy clothes today, appropriate for a semi-formal dinner; not her usual jeans, not her usual cotton shirt and pullover sweater, but a skirt of soft dark lavender wool with a knitted top and tiny wooden buttons. Her hair has been attractively fluffed-out. Her eyebrows have been plucked and thinned, given a little arch.

Her mother would see what this meant, instantly.

Oh, Sophia! Who is he?

Some of what Means is saying is familiar to Sophia, for it has origins in the lab. That you can induce stress in all creatures, even bacteria. That stressed rats have a higher mutation rate than rats that are not stressed but this does not (self-evidently) seem to be a result of natural selection, more likely an epiphenomenon of stressful environmental conditions like extreme heat or cold, dehydration, physical trauma.

The great variety of species and adaptations on Earth at the present time is a consequence of random errors that have increased the propagation of gene copies; the paradox, that natural selection would seem to reduce the frequency of mutations to zero, which would then reduce genetic variation to zero, and bring evolution to a halt.

The greater the change in environment, the greater the pressure on the organism to “adjust.” The old adage Better safe than sorry has no applicability to evolution nor even, Alistair Means says, with a rueful smile, to human life though it is an adage that has itself survived.

He is projecting slides onto a large screen. Densely specific, graphs and statistics. His talk, spirited in its generality, turns now to the arid precision of molecular biology, a computational science that holds little interest for Sophia. Only fleetingly is she able to understand—where the environment changes rapidly, natural selection must favor a higher mutation rate; no matter how many bad mutations, there is a greater likelihood for enough good mutations to assure the species’ survival among other species competing for the same food and territory.

Have there been animal species that acquired near-zero mutations? If so, these died out because they failed to adapt to environmental change.

Sophia has been listening so intently, there is a crick in her neck from leaning forward in her seat. Badly she wants to understand—she wants to understand him. But the points Means is making are becoming increasingly impenetrable to her, as the computational statistics on the screen are unreadable to her; she is disappointed in the turn the talk has taken, which others can follow, but not Sophia. She feels a pang of dismay, like one who flounders in a rough sea, trying in vain to grab hold of a lifeboat, breaking her fingernails in the effort. In the lifeboat are the survivors, and she is not one of them.

Wait! Please don’t leave me behind—the plea springs from her, silently.

Still, she will attend the dinner. In Alistair Means’s honor.

As his guest, she will attend. In the Institute dining room, in which she has never yet dined, though she can’t stay through the entire dinner, as she has explained.

It will be their first dinner together. Sophia wonders if it will come to be, in time, a kind of anniversary.

The lecture has ended. Much applause!

Questions are being raised. Sophia listens to these too, frowning, eager to understand. To a degree, she does understand. She is feeling less dismal. She is feeling, for the moment, hopeful. For forty minutes Alistair Means fields questions—thoughtfully, courteously, brilliantly. He makes every effort not to be impatient, even with aggressive questions. Even with pompous, rambling questions. She is proud of him. Surreptitiously she checks her cell phone which has been turned off for nearly two hours. She is surprised to see several calls.

She hears—Sophia? Dad is very bad. Please come as soon as you can. It is Beverly’s voice, agitated.

And another, also from Beverly—Sophia! Something happened, it looks like Dad might not make it. Where are you? Can you get here?

On her feet, dazed. Oh, what has she done? Why has she gone to Means’s lecture instead of the hospital? Pushing her way into the aisle. Excuse me! Excuse me! Alistair Means has come forward from behind the podium, to shake hands. He sees Sophia in the aisle. In the flush of well-being at the success of his talk Means may well imagine that Sophia McClaren is hurrying to him, with these others, to shake his hand and congratulate him; instead, to his surprise, Sophia seems not to see him. She has turned away, to ascend the aisle. “Sophia? Is something wrong?”—Means calls after her but she ignores him. She is indifferent, rude. It is clear that she is determined to make her way out of the auditorium, out of the Institute building, out of his life.

Going Home

Good news! We’re taking you home.

So eager to get dressed he fumbles thrusting his foot into the place where you put the leg, the trouser, off-balance and his dear wife laughs at him—Oh, darling! Let me help you. Often she kisses him for no reason other than she loves him. Slips her arm around his waist to support him.

She kisses him to calm him. If his temper flares up.

He is trying to make his way down. It is a cautious matter, to make your way down.

Fearful of stumbling on the flat things you step on, that go down, he has forgotten the word for what they are, it is not star, it is not stays, you step down on them going down, one foot and the other foot, very carefully.

Going down he can grip a railing. He can hold tight. One foot and the other foot.

Sees to his surprise that his feet are bare. Where are his socks and shoes?

He is not sure what he is wearing, that fits him loose like a gown. And his legs bare, and the hairs stirring.

He has fallen to the foot of the things-that-go-down. He has fallen onto his back.

He is fearful of moving, he is fearful that his spine has shattered.

They are calling to him—Johnny! Johnny come here!

Often he falls. He is such a little boy! His legs are so short. He has scabs on both knees. He falls but not hard for quickly he scrambles to his feet. He crawls on hands and knees. He makes funny barking noises like a puppy. He is a puppy, wiggles his little bottom like wiggling a tail, his parents laugh loving him so.

But first, he has to give away these damned flowers. Perfumy smell in the room like a funeral parlor. What do you think this is, a damned funeral parlor?

Damned crank-up bed is not a casket. Not yet!

For you, with my sincere gratitude. Thank you.

His favorite among the nurses. Polish girl. Blue eyes. Always smiling. Call me Whitey, that’s my God damn name.

Is he imagining, she caresses his face? His face is hot-mottled and raw. His eyes are those swirling little fruits in the slot machines. When the swirling ceases they are not lined up evenly, why he can’t fucking see straight.

He is very tired, giving away these potted flowers. They are bright gaudy colors as in a coloring book. There is too much to give away—someone will have to help him.

Baskets of fruit, beginning to rot. Balloons in flat pillow shapes, floating to the ceiling.

Is he imagining, the Polish girl had slipped her cool hand inside the nightshirt? Caressing his fatty torso, the stark nipples, hair-clusters across his chest and at his groin where no one could see.

She could not see. Legs curled up beneath her in the chair with arms, a blanket pulled over her.

But now, this morning there is good news. He is going home.

His dear wife has brought him this news. Her eyes are bright with tears, she is very happy.

He isn’t sure where he has been. But now, he is going home.

There is only one thing wrong, that makes him sad. He had promised her he would protect her but now, he is not so sure.

She has been removing his things from the closet. He had not known there was a closet in this place. Taking out his suit?—he had no idea that his suit was in this place. The three-piece plaid suit he’d been wearing that day, tight at the waist, had cost more than he’d ever paid for any article of clothing.

But that was a long time ago. Can’t remember how long. The lightning-bolts striking his body. His face. The explosion. The collapse. He has been slip-sliding since then. On the icy sidewalk he’d fallen, hard.

Johnny?—she is calling to him, anxiously.

He has not heard that voice in so long, he is numbed at first with happiness so vast he cannot comprehend it—confuses the sensation with fear, that fear of slipping-down, falling-down-hard, hurting—(for he is often crying, his child’s heart is easily wounded though it is also [as his parents are relieved to see] easily healed).

Except his feet are tangled in these damned bedclothes. Fishhook in his arm, in the soft skin at the crook of his elbow, he tears out.

That voice! It is her voice.

He is running to her, it is a bright happy day, his feet are bare in stubby tufts of grass. Are you my Johnny-boy? Darling come here.

His legs are too short, he is going to fall. Biting his lip to keep from crying if he falls, if his short legs fail him, but he has not fallen for Mommy catches him, under his arms, covers his face with kisses quick and wet like little fishes, that tickle. He is not afraid now. So happy his heart is filled with love to bursting like a child’s balloon blown big, tight and wonderful-shiny.