Commuters (22 page)

“It’s not something I can pass up,” Nona said.

“Who’s asking you to!” Avery shouted. People looked over, but she didn’t take her eyes off him. “Go! Go to fucking Rome. Why the fuck wouldn’t you?”

“The chance to work with these people—there’s this woman from Japan…It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing for someone who does what I do,” Nona said, fast and low. “My song cycle is going to be part of a collaboration with some artists that have been touchstones to me—they are giants in the field. Really on the cutting edge of what’s happening in the vocal—”

“Why for a whole year? Why Rome?”

“It’s actually just outside Rome. There’s this place, an artists’ colony—you live in a villa with five other people, and other musicians visit—”

Avery held up his hand. “You don’t need to read the brochure to me,” he said. It was the harshest he had ever spoken to her, this ugly sarcasm, but there was no reason not to.

Nona took a deep breath and went on, determined. “I don’t know why it’s a year,” she said. “It just is. That’s how long the grant lasts.”

“So you can be back and forth,” Avery said, his fork hovering. “A month here, a month there—”

But she was shaking her head. “It doesn’t work like that. There’s voice class every day, and weekly—”

“Then I’ll come,” Avery said. He stared at the meat dripping off the tines. “I’m not kidding. I’ll come too.”

Nona put her head in her hands. “It’s shared facilities,” she said, nearly whispering. “They don’t allow spouses or children to—”

“Well, I’m
not your fucking spouse
, am I?”

One thing he loved about Nona was that she never told him to keep his voice down. If anything, whenever they fought, she was just as loud in public, if not more so. They’d been glared at in restaurants all across the city, roaring at each other, cursing, slamming tabletops so hard the plates rattled. (Nona had once observed a direct relation between the cost of dinner and their likelihood of a big, ugly spat: the pricier the entrée, the louder their voices.) But for once she was quiet. She didn’t warn him to calm down, but she didn’t raise her voice to his level, either. And that’s how Avery understood this was serious. She was really going to leave him. A blast of self-hatred nearly made him swoon. God, he could just kick his own ass, for that fantasy of a few minutes ago—paying for the abortion he couldn’t argue her out of, holding her hand at the clinic, comforting her afterward.

Avery forced himself to swallow more food.

“What would you do in Rome?” Nona said gently, trying to make him see reason.

“What am I going to do here?” he said. “Without you?” That last was so hard to say out loud that Avery almost coughed up bile. Carl, headed their way with a big smile, veered sharply in another direction as soon as he caught sight of Avery’s face.

“You have your family,” Nona said. “Jerry needs you now. You have your friends here, you have the restaurant—”

“The
restaurant
?” Avery laughed. “Are you talking about that run-down money pit I’ve spent months trying to get off the ground? Yeah, that’s a real winner. It’s never going to happen.”

“Don’t say that,” Nona said. “It’s your work. When you find your real—”

“Do me a favor,” Avery snapped. “Spare me the patronizing
bullshit, okay? ‘Be a good boy, Avery, now go and cook your little dinners.’ Fuck you, all right?”

“All right,” Nona said. She put her napkin on the table. “I got it.”

“I don’t care about the restaurant,” Avery said. His voice thinned out. “I could care less about the whole thing. I only started it because you—” He fought the trembling in his throat, near his eyes. “Because I wanted you to—”

Nona gathered the straps of her dress and pulled them haphazardly over her shoulders. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said. “When I get back, I’d like you to take me home.” Her eyes were warm, but her voice was hollow and dried out, and when she squeezed past his chair, she didn’t touch him at all.

He tossed his credit card on the table, not noticing or caring that it landed on his plate, in a puddle of gravy. When his phone buzzed, he stared at the number dumbly, not recognizing the area code and not caring. Because there was not a single other goddamn thing in the world he could think of to do, Avery answered the call.

“Yeah?”

“Avery? It’s…I’m sorry to call so late. I thought maybe I’d get your voice mail. This is Rachel Brigham, by the way.”

Avery said nothing. The name meant nothing to him. The busboy plucked his card out of the food and wiped it on an apron.

“Your grandfather’s been in a car accident. Earlier tonight, with my mom. It was basically a fender bender, but he’s in the hospital and I just thought…Can you come out? Tomorrow, on the train, I mean? I can pick you up at the station.”

Avery sat still. A faint promise of nausea rumbled deep inside
his intestines. “Avery?” Rachel said. “He’s fine. Physically, he’s fine. But there are a lot of—well. Your mom is flying out, either sometime tomorrow or Monday. And I just think it would be a good idea if you got here first. My mom and her, together—well, do you know what I mean?”

“Okay,” he said, not knowing what else to do or say.

“You’ll come?” There was relief in Rachel’s voice. He nodded, stupidly. “Oh, thank God. That’s great. Just call me anytime, when you’re out of Grand Central, and let me know which train.”

Avery pressed end even as she was still speaking, thanking him. He could feel Nona’s approach, behind him, without looking, and now he braced himself to turn and face her.

January 8

Early morning. In the Valley Park emergency room, they were separated by a green curtain hung on metal rings. From the bed, where she was fastened to some sort of monitoring device, Winnie couldn’t reach the curtain to pull it aside. She watched the number of pairs of blue-bootied feet in that next space, increasing as the hours passed, sometimes three and four at a time. Barely anyone came to Winnie, once her minor forehead laceration had been stitched. Nor could she hear Jerry, or be heard by him, in the general din. When the wheels of his bed suddenly began to roll, taking him away, she called out in fear, unable to follow. Rachel held her hand, saying,
They’re just taking him for some tests. It’s all right.

Over the course of the night, their fortunes had tipped in opposite directions. In the initial hours after the impact, it was Winnie who caused the most concern. That was due to all the blood, of course, but her wound was a surface one, a half-inch gash near her left temple from the good hard smack she’d received from the
window. Matty and Jerry had helped her from the car, now spun around and stopped in the middle of the intersection at Ardleigh and Meade. It wasn’t until Winnie put a tentative hand up to her head, and brought it instantly down, a wet red glove, that she felt faint. And then she merely floated in and out, while Matty carried her to the grassy knoll by the side of the road, while Jerry crouched on one knee in front of her, while the EMTs—one had a Yankees symbol shaved into his hair—strapped her to a gurney and spoke loudly to her, making little jokes as they fixed her up on the short drive to Valley Park. And wasn’t Jerry standing there while they stitched and bandaged her? Or perhaps that had been Matty. White-faced, sweating Matty.
Not your fault,
she tried to tell him. They had been on their way back home from cocktails at Rena Davidson’s house; Winnie argued they hardly needed to call Matty for this outing, just on the other side of town, but Jerry had insisted—he never liked her to drive him, anyway.
Came out of nowhere,
Winnie struggled to say, to Matty/Jerry,
that other car.
(Later, she would learn that the other driver was a fifty-year-old woman covering her son’s shift for a pizza delivery company in Mount Morris.) It flew through the light and plowed right into them.
Lucky it wasn’t worse,
she told Matty—or Jerry. Or tried to; in her shock, the words she intended weren’t exactly making it out as speech.

By 10 or 11
PM
, though, she was clearheaded enough to be cross at Rachel, who asked only the doctors and nurses about her mother’s condition.

“I’m right here,” Winnie complained. “I’m not asleep.”

“Go right ahead and sleep, Mom,” Rachel said, missing the point entirely. “I’ll be here.”

From her curtained-off section right next to him, Winnie could only glimpse the flurry of activity around Jerry. Rachel was avoiding the truth, or didn’t know, either, what was wrong.

At 1
AM
, the resident who had been on Jerry’s side of the green curtain came to her bedside. He was a kind-faced Japanese man, with bright gray streaks in his hair. “A fair amount of delayed disorientation,” he said, asking for details of Jerry’s medications and previous conditions.

At Winnie’s halting mention of the pre-Alzheimer’s tests that she had learned about that day at Ed Weller’s office, Rachel snapped her head forward in surprise, and the doctor’s eyes flared with new interest. He asked a few probing questions and then seemed to put the matter away.

“…well, sometimes a typical inflammatory response to injury…be admitted, CT scans…know more in a few hours.”

Winnie became soundless. She was afraid to ask any questions, in case the answers suggested that Jerry could die. And the doctor’s compassionate smile as he carefully explained things to her, and to Rachel, at the foot of the bed—that meant that Jerry couldn’t die. Didn’t it? When a gray-haired Japanese man, with warmth in his tired eyes, delivered news in such a way, when he touched your head gently and bent to examine your stitches, pronouncing them as fine and tight as if he’d sewn them himself, didn’t it mean that everything was bound to be all right?

January 10

In the hallway outside Jerry’s hospital room, waiting for the doctors to emerge, Winnie recognized the LuxPool number on her phone, and pressed ignore for the third time since yesterday. Keeping her
distance several meters away, Annette, in a navy blazer and crisp blue jeans, still somehow managed to overhear what Winnie murmured in response to Rachel’s question.

“A pool?” she cried, a sharp sound of disbelief in her voice. These were the first words she had spoken to Winnie since arriving from the airport six hours earlier. “You think you’re putting in a
pool
. On that property.”

Winnie and Rachel just stared. Annette looked away. She dug an electronic device out of a bag and typed away with both thumbs.

A bent-over woman slowly pushed a walker past them, grinning up for approval with each step she took.

Annette let out a short laugh through her nose. “A
pool
,” she said again, confiding this idiocy to the electronic device.

Dr. Lee had apparently been briefed on the Trevis family situation; when she came out of Jerry’s room, she knew to address both Winnie and Annette (as it turned out, Avery didn’t come out until several days later), taking turns with which piece of information she would distribute, like a mother carefully dispensing equal amounts of cookies to fractious children.

“The scans don’t show any bleeding internally,” she said to Winnie. “But we can’t rule out swelling or brain contusion at this point.” This was directed to Annette. “I’d like to hold him for observation”—back to Winnie—“but I’m also going to order some more specialized brain MRIs, because of what we know with his prior experiences with dementia”—this last to Annette, who pressed her lips together tightly.

“I have to warn you,” Dr. Lee said, and this time she looked at the door to Jerry’s room. “Sometimes trauma to the head, in a pa
tient with a previous history of Alzheimer’s-type difficulties, can speed up or exacerbate any existing or dormant symptoms.”

“What do you mean, speed up?” Rachel asked.

“Let’s just wait to see what these scans reveal,” Dr. Lee said, retreating to the safety of knowledge delayed.

Both Annette and Rachel launched a volley of questions at Dr. Lee, competing to drown each other out, but Winnie said nothing. She stepped quickly into the room with Jerry, and pulled the door shut behind her. What stayed with her: how much like Jerry Annette had looked just then, jaw thrust out, arguing her case.

January 16

The gift shop in the hospital lobby hadn’t gotten the newspapers yet; it was barely 8 am. When Winnie asked the friendly Indian woman opening up what the date was, she said “Monday,” but Winnie didn’t press the point. Magazines, candy, coffee mugs and wineglasses etched with
Valley Park
, a chipped red canister used to inflate balloons, T-shirts of all sizes, including the snap kind for small babies, greeting cards with out-of-focus photos of lilies, their insides blank. She moved around the tiny space, picking things up and putting them down. (They were giving him a sponge bath.) Winnie carried a spiral-bound date book to the counter and paid for it. By counting off days, she found what the date was. The Indian woman lent her a pen; Winnie flipped to Jan 16 and put a checkmark there.

“Take a walk, Beth Ann,” is what he’d said to her, when she asked if he wanted her to leave the room.

Beth Ann?
But Winnie had said nothing.

January 30

It turned out to be a star day, so Winnie stayed home.

In the front lawn of 50 Greenham, there was now a large dirt rectangle, scraped free of grass, dusted with snow and staked on all sides by uneven slats of wood. Unable to explain why or why not, or to think everything through, Winnie had simply said yes to LuxPool.

She had been on her way to Fresh Market for milk and toilet paper, but after she saw Jerry tease the nurse when she fumbled with the buttons on his shirtsleeves, cursing them under her breath—they both liked her, the sassy one with the bleached blonde hair and a smoker’s cough—she took off her coat. These hours were not to be missed. But she would have stayed home even if it had been a check day, and so far these things—flirting with the nurse, and a good hour’s nap before lunch, and saying, “Ficus,” just like that, out of the blue, when she had wondered aloud what was this new plant the boy from Mendell Florists had just dropped off—had proved only that, a check day. A check was not nothing, though, especially this first week back home. She knew enough not to hope for more. But she had only found out that it was a star day when his eyes lit at finding her there, tucked into a quiet corner of his bedroom, watching the ritual of his vitals check, warming to the way he smiled up at the nurse.

“Well, look at the little church mouse,” Jerry had barked, delighted. “Who you hiding from, Winnie?”

There.
A star day. Then she had hurried to his side when he slapped the mattress next to him.

“We don’t object to an audience, do we?” he asked.

“No, sir, we sure don’t,” the nurse said.

So Winnie had curled there on the bed next to him, in her slacks and sweater and stocking feet. She had held as still as if it were her own temperature, blood pressure, and respiration being assessed. Only her eyes moved, sliding back and forth between the nurse’s busy expression—how she muttered so, this one with the nicotine breath, but he didn’t seemed to dislike or notice it—and Jerry’s reaction to her swift, competent hands. When Nurse Bottle-Blonde slapped him gently on the side, saying “Let’s have at your back, big guy,” Jerry rolled toward Winnie—eyes snapping with mischief—and they cuddled there, faces not two inches apart, his breath warm and musty. The nurse bent lower to listen as she moved her instruments along his back, mouth working, her lipstick flaking off in frosted pink shavings. Jerry stage-whispered to Winnie, with a lascivious wink: “In my fantasies, as a younger man…this wasn’t quite the setup.” Both women laughed, told him to just hush.

A star day.

That night, Winnie firmly drew one—two intersecting lines in an X, a horizontal line, and then a vertical—next to the date, in the Sierra Club book she’d bought at the hospital, now kept bedside. With great effort, she resisted the urge to page back, past bear cubs and sunsets and snowcapped ridges, to count the number of star days—or notice their absence—since the accident. On a star day, Jerry knew who she was. He said her name. For the other kind, the bad sort—well, she either marked nothing or put down a squiggly kind of blot, the sort of thing you’d use to cross out a mistake or a wrong word.

A merely good day, on the other hand—one marked with a check—meant that there was little pain, no falling down, minor
instances of confusion, and that it was likely she would be
Beth Ann
. Beth Ann, when she brought up his soup around noon, his cookies at three, or when she coaxed him out of the same undershirt he’d been wearing for days. “Beth Ann’s always making me eat,” he’d grouse to whatever nurse happened to be nearby. “Beth Ann says” or “Don’t tell Beth Ann, but…” The nurses would nod or agree sympathetically; either they didn’t care that he was mixing up her name with his first wife, dead now for almost twenty years, or they didn’t even know Winnie’s first name themselves, rotating in and out of so many different homes as the job required. Or they cared, and they knew, but what was there to do, really? That was fast becoming her own attitude. So Winnie would grit her teeth when he called her that, to others, to her own face—it was worse when he did it so lovingly—and muster strength against everything that shouted within her,
I am not your Beth Ann!

February 9

Began as a check day, quickly downgraded.

“That boy never cleans the shitter! He oughta be canned, on the spot! That boy—” Roars coming from his room; she had been on the phone; she had thought he was napping. Flew across the room at her, naked legs covered in excrement, the stench like a slap in the face. He had gone to the bathroom in his closet. Batting away her fluttering hands, face red and violent, he smeared his filth across the blue bedspread.

“I’ll whup his ass for him! Teach
him
not to do his duty!”

She ran the shower, in a panic from his bellowing. The room fogged, Jerry rushed in and out, calling for men she didn’t know. His yelling was brutal and nerve shattering in that close, tiled space.

Finally he sat on the toilet, a naked, shivering bear of a man. She cleaned him with a warm washcloth, terrified he might hit her. He grumbled and spoke nonsense; Winnie agreed with everything he said.

Outside, the pool men clanged their metal on metal; they were happy, almost to lunch.

February 12

“I should bring
them
some tea,” Winnie said, more to herself than to Jerry. They were sitting out in hard iron chairs on the front patio, well wrapped, holding mugs of hot tea, for a fifteen-minute fresh-air break. Jerry was watching the workers with great interest, despite the cold, following their every move. He took out a worn, folded red handkerchief and blew his nose loudly, with relish. For some reason, this cheered Winnie up.

“It’s fun, isn’t it? But I had no idea there would be so much to do before the actual digging.”

The men walked back and forth across the bare ground, carrying tools and equipment, speaking to each other in Spanish. Jerry craned his head to get a better view.

A pine needle fell onto the surface of Winnie’s tea; she picked it out. “This is still…all right with you, isn’t it? Going through with it, building the pool? You still want to have it done, don’t you?” Winnie spoke in a low voice, almost to her mug. Jerry hated to waste money; was that what she was doing? And why hadn’t she really talked this through with him, before? Last year, anytime the pool had come up, all he’d ever said was,
Go ahead, Winifred, knock yourself out.
But she hadn’t really taken the time to find out what he thought; she’d imagined that his reticence was about the back
pain, not about any reservations he held about the expense, or the location of the pool, or the tree. She’d dismissed what Rachel had argued, that the pool would damage what the house was worth, but now Winnie wondered if this was Jerry’s view. Was he able, now, to tell her what he really thought? Had he been able to, back then?