Signs and Wonders

Forks

Alan was lying facedown in Center Square, a squiggle of vomit on the pavement beside him, his one good leg folded sideways. He looked bad and smelled worse, and if he’d been anybody else I would’ve kept walking. But he was Stephanie’s brother, so we both bent down and I shook his shoulder. The classical music the city played to discourage loitering trilled around us, and on the other side of the square two homeless guys smoked their cigarettes and watched.

“Hey, kiddo,” Stephanie said, crouching next to him and feeling for his pulse, her curly blond hair spilling over her shoulders. Together, we dragged him to a sitting position, against a stone memorial to the Civil War dead. Alan’s head lolled to the side. Having seen the family photos, I knew that at one time he’d been a good-looking teenager, green-eyed, with a dimple in his cheek. It was hard to imagine girls going for him now. During his second tour in Afghanistan, an IED took off his left foot, and since he came back, Stephanie said, he’d been struggling. That looked like an understatement.

We hoisted him up and anchored him on our shoulders. His eyes were closed, but I could feel him trying to steady himself, to help us out. It took fifteen minutes to get him across the street and into the backseat of Stephanie’s Civic. She wanted to sit back there with him, so I drove us up the hill to Forks Township. Her condo was in a subdivision that had sprung up too fast, and half the houses were empty. With all those carless driveways and skinny, seedling trees, the neighborhood had a creepy feel. As I drove, I glanced at them in the rearview mirror. Her arm was around him, his head leaning against her neck. His eyelids fluttered. He was smiling.

I met Stephanie my first week at the clinic, which was also my first week in the Lehigh Valley. I was a brand-new doctor, and newly single. Robin, my girlfriend since medical school, had said she’d come with me to Pennsylvania but then, at the last minute, took a job in San Francisco instead. She’d barely even apologized. “San Francisco, Tom,” she’d said, spreading her palms, the difference between California and eastern Pennsylvania too manifest to require explanation. So I moved alone. The job was at a large practice with a staff of young doctors, including me, who rotated through before pushing on to bigger hospitals in other cities. I myself didn’t plan on being here long. What I hoped was to set up my own practice in a nice suburb of Philly, maybe Cherry Hill, where I’d grown up; this place was just a stopover.

Stephanie was the head nurse on my first shift. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that fought to contain it; it frizzed around her forehead, and she kept lifting her hand to smooth it down. She showed me around the place, introduced me to everyone, and from the offhand way she said my name I understood that she had my number and didn’t count on my staying long either. She was a good nurse, unflappable and smart. Two weeks after we met, I was walking to my car when I noticed her leaving at the same time.

“Hey,” I said.

“Doctor.”

“Call me Tom, please.”

“Okay, Tom,” she said. Her tone was not inviting. She was wearing a lumpy brown cardigan over pink scrubs and Crocs, as unattractive an outfit as I’d ever seen, but somehow I still kept straining at its outlines, wondering just what it disguised.

“Buy you a drink? I don’t really know where to go around here, but maybe you can tell me.”

She cocked her head to one side, not smiling. I was expecting her to shake her head, but instead she said, “Let’s go.”

She took me to a sports bar, and over drinks she was quiet. At one point, I caught her looking at her watch. But then she leaned over to me in the booth and suddenly we were making out. She tasted like chicken wings and rum.

She never sought me out at work, and we didn’t flirt there, but whenever I’d ask her if she wanted to grab a bite or a drink, she said yes. Stephanie was a local, born and raised in Macungie; her father had worked at Bethlehem Steel until it closed, her mother as a secretary for the school district. They didn’t have a lot of money, and she’d put herself through nursing school working as a waitress. As soon as she told me that, I felt like I could picture her no-nonsense way of taking orders, a change belt wrapped around her thin hips.

“I bet you got great tips,” I said.

She looked at me, her mouth in a straight line. She had these deadpan expressions that took me a while to figure out, and I liked her for that.

“Enough for school,” she said. “And a car. And a couple trips to Mexico.”

We’d been dating for around a month when she called and asked me to help her with her brother. She hadn’t said much about him, just that he’d been injured while serving and she wasn’t sure what he’d do now. He was younger than her by a few years, and I had the feeling she’d always looked out for him. They’d gone to high school with a guy who was now on the police force, and he’d called her when Alan passed out in the square.

On the short drive back to her place, we didn’t say much. I could hear her talking to him in the backseat, just simple things. “You don’t look good, Alan. We’re going to take you home and get you cleaned up. I’ll make you some grilled cheese. Or whatever you want.” As if she were his mother. Her arm was around his, their blond heads clustered together, and I felt like their chauffeur, some hired hand. When we got there, she guided him into the bathroom. His clothes stank, and his arms and chest were crowded with tattoos and bruises. He looked tough, but he was pliant while we stripped him.

Together we bathed him, as if he were a dirty overgrown child, and he started to come around a little. He didn’t seem upset that we were manhandling him. He was very polite. “Thanks,” he kept saying, and “I’m sorry.” When he was more or less clean, we helped him out of the bathtub and Stephanie asked me to get him some fresh clothes from a dresser in her bedroom. Apparently they were his own clothes, because they fit just fine.

“This is Tom,” Stephanie told him, once he was dressed.

“I’m sorry we met like this,” Alan said. He held out his hand and we shook. His blond hair was lank, and his green eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with exhaustion. I’d have given him a B12 shot and locked him in rehab for a month, but he wasn’t my brother.

“No problem,” I said.

She fed him a grilled cheese sandwich, as promised, and put him in her spare room. Then she and I went to bed.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“It’s not the first time,” she said, shrugging helplessly. “His leg kills him.”

“What’s he on, medication-wise?”

“He’s been on everything. He always says it doesn’t help.”

She was undressed for bed, and her back was covered in tiny freckles. I set myself to tracing them with my index finger, making constellations out of them, a triangle, a star. I loosed her hair from its ponytail, and it sprang to life, a million curls clouding her shoulders. She lay down and folded herself against me, pulling my arm across her stomach. I wondered if she was crying. But she turned, and kissed me, then moved down my stomach and took me in her mouth, and I closed my eyes, not thinking about anything else at all.

After that night, I was deep into Stephanie’s life, and I liked it there. We started spending most weekends together, and I met her parents, who were sweet, tired people, too impressed that I was a doctor for me to be comfortable around them. She showed me around Bethlehem: the shuttered factory they’d turned into a casino, the quaint cobblestoned Main Street, the shambling towpath along the Delaware canal. Sometimes we went hiking in the Poconos, the mountains’ dazzling green bisected by the truck-heavy rumble of I-80. The whole place seemed hardscrabble to me, gritty and rural, and as much as I liked Stephanie, I had a hard time imagining staying there for long.

As I got to know her, I realized how closely her life and Alan’s were intertwined. She was constantly bailing him out, helping him get job interviews, putting him up for the night when another in his series of housing arrangements — he’d get a new roommate or a new girlfriend, then argue with them and move out — crumbled.

I answered the door one night in December to find him standing on the doorstep, swaying a little. Over one shoulder was a blue backpack he always had with him, and sometimes I wondered if it contained all his worldly possessions.

“Yo,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“We have, actually. More than once.”

“It was a joke, Doctor Tom.”

“Oh,” I said. He was just as deadpan as his sister. “Come on in. Steph’s cooking.”

When she saw him coming into the kitchen her face lit up, nothing deadpan about that. She was always happy when he came, no matter what condition he was in. For the first few minutes, we were so distracted by the commotion of cooking and getting all the food on the table that we didn’t notice how high he was. But then I realized he wasn’t eating, just holding up his fork and looking at it, as if inspecting it for cleanliness. He seemed transfixed. After a while the two of us watched in silence.

Finally he noticed, and put it down. “It’s beautiful, you know?” he said.

“It’s Mom and Dad’s old set,” Stephanie said. She passed me some garlic bread, nudging me to hand the basket to Alan. She wanted him to get something into his stomach.

“No, I mean forks in general,” Alan said musingly. “There’s this perfection to them. You know what word I’ve always liked? Tines. The tines of a fork. It sounds so perfect, like little chimes. Like a trinity. Like a trinity of chimes.”

“Oh, kiddo,” Stephanie said. “What did you take?”

Alan smiled at her. He was the most affable addict I’d ever met. “I feel good,” he said. “I got a little help from Ludo.”

This was a guy from Allentown who’d served in Alan’s unit. They hung around together a lot, though they often fought, Ludo driving off and leaving him stranded at a bar, or a McDonald’s at midnight, or a truck stop in Ohio, halfway through some road trip they’d cooked up and then abandoned.

I could see he wasn’t going to eat anything, and Stephanie’s eagerness for him to be there like a normal person was tearing at my heart. “How about you lie down for a bit?” I said.

He smiled at me, his green eyes warm. “That’s not a terrible idea, sir,” he said. He settled himself on the couch, and in a couple minutes we could hear him snoring. At first Stephanie just sat there, staring down at her spaghetti, tears glimmering in her eyes. But I reminded her she didn’t want to get sick, that she had to keep her strength up, and she nodded and lifted her fork. She was sensible like that.

After dinner, I did the dishes while Stephanie made up the spare room for Alan, then crashed in front of the TV. To my surprise, when I went back there to check on him, he was awake. The bedside lamp was on and he was reading one of her Cosmos.

“Guess what?” he said when he saw me. “The female body has a hundred pleasure receptors.”

“Must be nice,” I said.

“Seriously,” he said. “I know maybe three.”

“Yeah.” This wasn’t a topic I was interested in pursuing. “You need anything?”

“Where’s Steph?”

“Sleeping. She’s had a long day.”

“I hear you,” he said. “I hear you.” He was sitting propped up against the pillows, his legs straight out in front of him. With his shoes still on you couldn’t tell which one was the prosthetic foot. He saw me looking.

“You’re a doctor. Tell me why it’s the one that’s gone that hurts.”

“The nerve endings,” I said. “They call it ghost pain. The OxyContin should help.”

He snorted. “I’m not going to lie to you, OxyContin’s like baby aspirin to me at this point.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. “How’s the physical therapy going?”

“How do you think?” He closed his eyes, and a small smile played across his face. “I was in this tank once, me and Ludo,” he said. “We were going through this patch of desert when we heard all this artillery, it sounded real heavy. And then it just stopped. Ludo tells me to stick my head out and see what’s going on. I say no way, I’m gonna get killed. We argue about it for a while. Finally I say okay and stick my head out the top. I look around and I can’t see a damn thing. Not one single person for miles. All I see is this brown desert. After a while, none of it makes sense to me. You know how if you look at a word too long, you can’t tell if it’s a real word? I couldn’t even tell the difference between the sand and the sky. Finally Ludo pulls me back down. The weird thing is, we never did hear anything about combat engagement that day. Nobody ever said one word about it.”

“Was that where you got hurt?” I said.

“No,” he said. “That was somewhere else.”

He was so quiet after that I figured he’d fallen asleep. I was about to switch off the light when he finally spoke. “You got anything on you, Doctor Tom?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t hold out on me,” he said. He opened his eyes and there was no affability there, no sweetness at all. “Don’t you fucking hold out.”

I could see how much he hated me. For being a doctor, for fucking his sister. For having both my feet, for waking each day without pain. “I don’t have anything,” I said, and left.

Steph kept inviting him over for dinner. I think she hoped that the more time he spent with her, in her calm, organized orbit, the more it would rub off on him. Or maybe she was just hoping to keep him decently fed. When invited, he always showed up, always toting that backpack, mostly sober, sometimes not. Once I woke up at midnight and went to the bathroom only to find him passed out next to the sink. I poured cold water over his head to wake him up. He came around slowly, shaking his head, and grabbed at me. He’d lost weight, and he was scrawny, but his arms were strong and ropy with muscle. I went through his backpack. He had five different medications in there but all the vials were empty. Other than the meds, there was nothing in the backpack except a dog-eared copy of Sports Illustrated and wallet with a Costco card in it.

“Please get the fuck off me,” he said, pushing me away.

“How much did you take?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Did you throw up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do it now.”

“I’m sleepy now, man.”

“Do it now, or I’ll have to take you in and pump your stomach.”

“Okay,” he said, “Okay.” He stuck his fingers down his throat until he gagged. He seemed practiced at it. I sat with him for an hour or so, leaning next to him against the wall and making him drink water, until I felt like he was all right.

Midnight, Tuesday. It was February, an icy night with the roads as slick as rinks, when we got the call from St. Luke’s. Someone had found Alan behind a bar. It seemed possible he’d been there an entire day and night before he was discovered. The temperature hadn’t been above freezing for a week. By the time we got to the hospital, he was awake. The skin on his face was peeling, his lips cracked and bloody.

“Hey, kiddo,” Stephanie said. As she leaned over him, covering his hand with hers, he bared his teeth at her like an animal.

“Leave me the fuck alone,” he said.

Stephanie had just worked a double shift. Exhausted, she started to cry. “Alan,” she said.

I touched her arm. “Why don’t you take a minute?”

She hung her head. She didn’t want to leave him, but she was about to lose it. She nodded, resigned. “I’m going to call Mom and Dad,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.”

As soon as she was gone his mood seemed to clear, and he grinned at me. The dimple in his cheek was still there when he smiled, incongruous against the chapped skin. I’d never seen him like this, his moods so all over the place.

“I only got frostbite in one foot,” he said. “So that’s an upside.”

“It’s good to stay positive,” I said.

Just as quickly as it had arrived, his manic mood left and his grin evaporated. His green eyes were steady. “You could really do me a favor, you know,” he said. “Man to man.” He didn’t say anything else. He cocked his head in the direction of his backpack.

I knew he probably had a whole pharmacy in there. He’d been at the VA hospital in Wilkes-Barre, and they were trying out some new meds, seeing if they could control his pain any better. Stephanie had told me she was hopeful it was going to work, but she said this every time, about each new treatment and every fresh promise from Alan. At work, I’d seen her treat patients with cool professionalism, helpful as she could be, distant as she needed to be. With her brother, it was always going to be different.

“Help me out, Doctor Tom,” he said.

He had that deadpan expression, but it wasn’t disguising some flash of humor. It was just dead. “Please,” he said.

I picked up his backpack and placed it on his bed. It was heavy, and I didn’t ask what was in it. I brought him some water, then turned off the light and closed the door behind me. The hallway was deserted, and I found Stephanie and took her down to the lobby and made her drink a cup of coffee, keeping her down there as long as I could. The nurses went to check on him, but not in time.

I’d been a doctor for less than a year.

I wouldn’t say he looked peaceful. I would say he looked shrunken, and ill-used, and older than his age, which was twenty-six.

I held Stephanie in my arms while she cried. I knew then, feeling her lean into me, feeling my own sadness catch fire from hers, that I loved her, and wanted to marry her, and I stored this feeling away in my heart for a happier day, assuming that we would get to one eventually.

There was a small service, at which Alan and Stephanie’s mother cried dryly, hopelessly, and Ludo gave the eulogy. He said Alan had saved his life by walking in front of him one day, that otherwise, he would have been the one who got injured. “It sucks,” he said.

After the first week, Stephanie didn’t cry all that much. She threw herself into work, double and even triple shifts; she would have worked even more if rules hadn’t forbidden it. In the evenings she cooked for me and ate very little herself, and I tried to be there for her, to listen if she wanted to talk, to hold her at night when she turned to me. On weekends we went on walks, and to the movies. Once, we went to Atlantic City and drank too much and gambled and slept together, and when she smiled for what seemed like the first time in months, I began to feel the clouds parting around us.

Then one night I came home at six and Stephanie was lying on the couch sobbing violently, her shoulders shaking with the force of it. I got her a tissue and she blew her nose into it, honkingly.

She sat up, her knees pulled up to her chin like a child. “It just sort of hit me,” she said, “that he’s never coming back.”

There was nothing I could do to comfort her. She wouldn’t let me touch her. I wondered if on some level she knew, or suspected, what I’d done. “Leave me alone,” she kept saying, and she sounded just like her brother. I left the house, drove around for a while, stopped at a bar. I started thinking about my old life in Philadelphia, the friends I had there, and the women I’d known, and it seemed like I’d been under some kind of spell, living an unreal life. I had these thoughts, but when I got back to the condo, Stephanie had composed herself. She fixed us each a drink. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just so hard.”

“I know,” I said.

I put my arms around her, and we sat together on the couch. She leaned against my shoulder, her hair brushing my chin. I looked out the window at the half-empty subdivision. No lights showed in the houses nearby, and the blackness of the street blended into the inky night. There was no horizon. It reminded me of the story Alan had told me, about not being able to tell the difference between sand and sky. It sounded almost beautiful to me, to be lost for a moment like that, with no one to tell you which way was up.