Mercy Train (10 page)

Her mother had gone to town to deliver one of her famous Jenny Lind cakes to the Veterans' Home, and her father was out in the fields somewhere beyond the ridge surveying the new wheat grass shoots. Iris pulled on a cardigan and went out back to the garden, where there was still, strangely, plenty of spinach and broccoli to pick. Here it was November and it was in the mid-sixties—it had been unseasonably warm for weeks—and even if her father was concerned that there would be too much crop growth before the land froze, she was happy about it, giddy with the reprieve from the withering cold that would last until April.

There was no warning, no weather service radio announcement, no siren. The wind started first and Iris spun around in her skirt. But all of a sudden it was very cold, and the sleet poured from the sky in freezing sheets, and wind almost knocked her over, and Iris knew something was terribly wrong. She ran to the house. Within an hour the temperature had dropped forty degrees, and it was a raging blizzard, the winds driving snow in every direction. She could see nothing but white from the windows. She didn't even see the car's headlights as it drove right up to the edge of the porch. Her mother pushed through the front door, gasping, her sweater, hair, even her eyelashes covered in snow.

Iris ran to her, relieved to see her but a little thrilled, too, by the scariness and excitement of the storm. It was like the time they'd had to huddle in the cellar during a tornado, like she was Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
, the winds moaning above them. They'd sung songs and eaten pickles she'd helped her mother can the previous fall.

“Where's your father?” her mother said. Her normally impassive face was tense in fear and wet with melting snow.

Iris's stomach dropped. She had not given him a thought.

“Iris, look at me,” her mother said, grabbing her shoulders with her strong, cold fingers. “Didn't he come in?”

“He must have gone to the machine shed. He must have.”

Her mother ran to the kitchen window, but she couldn't even see to the chicken coop. She dashed to the catchall closet in the hall where tools mingled with cleaning supplies and winter boots. Iris knew her mother was going out to find him.

“Mother, no.” She started to cry, panicking. “You can't go out there.” She wanted to say, You can't leave me, but she knew it sounded selfish.

“Get my coat, Iris, and gloves and a hat. A wool blanket from the cedar chest.”

Iris collected these things with her heart rattling in her chest.

Her mother tied one end of a large coil of rope around the outside of her coat and tied the blanket around her head.

“Hold on to this end,” her mother said. The rope must have been a hundred feet. She gave her daughter a rare kiss. “It'll be fine, Iris.” And she was gone, the door whipping open and cracking against the side of the house.

Iris gripped the rope, wrapping it around her rigid hand, shivering, as snow blew into the kitchen. She watched the loops of the rope slowly uncoil. And when the rope went taught, she held fast, offering God everything for her parents' return. A snowdrift grew on the landing as she watched, a powdery tower.

Ten minutes later, they were back, blundering through the door, dazed, her father with the blanket around him, still holding her mother's hand. He sat stiffly at the kitchen table as she bustled about filling the bathtub. She unpeeled the blanket and his sodden clothes, and helped him into the steamy bathroom.

Iris had stood dumbly by, unable to say anything, clutching the end of the limp rope.

They'd closed the door and gotten in the bathtub together.

*   *   *

It was warmer now, the humidity rising with the morning, and Iris, her fingers quick to get cold these days, was comfortable in the day's heat. It was difficult to conjure the feeling of that blizzard almost sixty years ago, but her heart still ricocheted recalling the ferocity of the storm, how close, in those minutes she sat with a rope in her hand, life was to death. The stories had trickled in for days about those who had died: duck hunters stranded on river islands, a family buried in a stalled car, a young farmer who went to get wood from the barn and got lost, ending up frozen in a field. It could have so easily included Samuel Olsen, lost half a mile out in his wheat field, who'd picked a direction and started walking, hoping his internal compass was right, and came upon his fearless and dogged wife, a tether around her waist, who'd come to bring him home.

“That was so brave, what you did,” she had said to her mother the next morning.

“You do what you can for those close to you,” her mother had said. “There's nothing brave about it.”

Even now, Iris didn't know what to make of her parents' marriage. As a girl she had begrudged them for not holding hands or kissing or dancing to the radio. Later, she believed that neither had expected a lot from life, so they had been satisfied with mere companionship. But now it seemed their devotion was something far greater, quiet and abiding: faith that one was always looking out for the other.

Iris swung her feet off the couch and sat up wincing, her head swimming in stars, a deafening pulse in her ears. When her eyes cleared she looked around the room at the things she could clear out now so her children wouldn't have to deal with them: a bowl of conch shells she'd found on morning beach strolls, Scrabble—Henry's—and Yahtzee, a glossy book of photos of Sanibel's “Ding” Darling Wildlife Refuge, even the TV. But maybe Samantha will want to watch something while she's here, she thought.

Although it was never stated as such, Samantha was coming to care for Iris until she died. After the double mastectomy and the radiation had failed and the cancer was everywhere, Iris had asked her oncologist how much time he'd wager she had left. She had thought he'd say a year. He raised his shoulders and palms in a defeated shrug and said, “Maybe six months if you're lucky.” Lucky. That wasn't how she would have put it, but here she was six months later, still ticking. But the ticking was stalling, skipping, slowing a bit more each day.

Samantha would arrive tomorrow. Iris sometimes thought of her daughter as a twittering bird, anxious and restless. Marriage and art—Samantha was an accomplished potter—had been grounding for her, but now that she was pregnant, Iris saw the nervousness come flooding back. Her son-in-law Jack was not all he could be. He was fine, Iris supposed, though she had hoped for someone with a little more oomph. Maybe she'd never gotten over his weak handshake. She knew she was being unfair, surely she was afraid that her daughter was repeating her own mistakes, her willingness to settle for just okay. And Samantha was not like Iris, it was true. Samantha ached to be a mother. She was exhilarated by each passing week of pregnancy—“Mom, she's the size of a baseball!”—and didn't see motherhood as a duty to fulfill. Iris worried about what would happen after the euphoria wore off and the grind set in, those long hours tending to a baby insatiable for food, attention, comfort. Those long hours trying to figure out if it was worth it after all.

Oh, Samantha, Iris thought. I wish I could be there for you then.

A succession of quick knocks hammered the door, startling Iris. Samantha? No, no, she was still in Wisconsin. I am here on the couch in Sanibel, Iris said to herself, trying to settle her mind. The knocks began again.

“Coming,” she said weakly, wiping the drool from the corner of her mouth. She rose and teetered to the door, at the last minute realizing she was still in her robe. “Who is it?”

“Honey, it's me, Stephen. From next door.”

She opened the door, the day clear now, the muggy warmth soft and heavy. Stephen was shirtless, his chest muscled and hairless and bronzed an orangish hue, and he wore his uniform pants and tasseled loafers.

“I'm so sorry to bother you,” he said breathlessly. “This is super embarrassing. I'm locked out? I went to say goodbye to a friend. The door was propped open. Oh, it doesn't even matter, does it? The point is I'm going to be late for work and I can't be late for work. The convention has descended. The wacky orchid people.”

What is he talking about? Iris wondered.

“Is there some way I can help you?” she finally asked.

“I need to climb over your balcony to mine. If you wouldn't mind.”

“Of course not,” she said pulling open the door. “Come on in.”

“I love your place,” he said, looking around. “So…”

“Old Lady Florida-ish?”

Stephen spun around.

“Hardly. It's kind of mid-century chic. White lacquer is very in these days.”

Iris chuckled, indulging his flattery. He had kind eyes underneath the showy affectations, river green and clear.

Stephen bent down to pick up her book, which had fallen to the floor when she'd risen.

“Book club?” he asked, examining the cover.

“Of one,” she said, pointing to herself.

“Do they get there?”

“What?”

“To the lighthouse?”

“I don't know. The young boy wants to go, but the father always has a reason not to take him.”

“I know the feeling,” Stephen said, handing her back the book.

All at once she wished she had made more of an effort with him over the years. Invited him for tea. Or dropped by with scones after the man of the night had left in the morning. And why had she ignored that pea-sized knot she had felt in her breast the night Henry had told her he could not leave his wife? She had felt it, and then pretended that she hadn't. Was it fear or denial or resignation? Or was it that she wanted to opt out? Even now, she couldn't really say. It wasn't until many months later, when her breast had become hot and painful, that she could no longer pretend. Now it seemed loony that she had let it go, giving the disease an irrevocable head start.

“I will owe you forever, Irene,” Stephen said. “You're a doll face. That new haircut really suits you, by the way. A pixie Anna Wintour.”

His compliment was preposterous, but still it brightened her. It would be her last haircut, and she was pleased that he had noticed.

As he passed the kitchen, Stephen registered the pill bottles on the counter with the subtlest of eye flicks. Iris was about to explain, but he moved quickly past, not wanting her to reveal the details. Life was hard enough, she imagined him thinking, without someone else's suffering ladled on top.

He wavered a little as he climbed over her balcony railing, his legs wobbly like a colt's.

“If you ever need anything,” he said. His offer trailed off as he slid open his glass balcony door.

Iris started to wave, but Stephen was already gone.

The encounter had worn her out. Iris went into the kitchen and stared down her pills. She took them grudgingly, each one leaving a hard, chalky path down her throat. She stared into the refrigerator, then pulled out a bowl of raspberries and set it on the table next to her book, before easing into the chair.

Why did Mrs. Ramsay want everyone to get married when her own marriage wasn't so great? Iris gingerly chewed a berry, not biting too hard for fear of the seeds. Was marriage ever that great? Iris did miss Glenn sometimes; those years together had bred a comforting shared history, an ease of communication, not about their feelings for each other maybe, but a shorthand of words and body cues with which to navigate the world. After the divorce she was sorry she had lost the one person she could really talk to about Samantha and Theo, the one person who could understand without setup or explanation. “Theo is being Theo, isn't he?” or “I worry that Samantha is going to pull a Sally Reed.” Iris hoped that Glenn missed her sometimes, too. Maybe when Marie was prattling on about dream catchers and turquoise jewelry and sagebrush incense, or whatever it was they talked about, he would think fondly of Iris. She wondered if Glenn would attend her funeral. Should there be a funeral? No. She would be dead, and that would be that.

Her mother had died of a heart attack, in her sleep, at the age of seventy-nine. She had lived alone on what was left of the farm, some chickens and two pigs in the yard, in the faded farmhouse, the porch sagging some and partially obscured by the lilacs, which Iris had watched her father plant, now a fragrant tangle of overgrown branches. Her mother had always been a hardy sort, never admitting to being sick or sore or tired, and Iris was particularly glad that she had not had to experience an insidious, hostile takeover of her body by disease. Her mother had died without having to think about death, and that surely beat worrying about it.

It was eleven o'clock. Iris needed to shower, to get dressed, to mimic the routine of normalcy.

“Soldier on another day, dear,” Henry would have said. And she would have hopped to it, his warm, quiet voice a trigger. She missed him terribly.

He was tall and rangy, his shoulders a little stooped, with full white hair and a roman nose, on the bridge of which rested a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. How perfectly professorial, Iris had thought, given he had been the chair of the history department at a small New England college. She had known he was married from the beginning. But even after they'd met twice for coffee and spent a languid afternoon strolling the Indigo Trail in the wildlife preserve, pointing out different species of birds, Iris didn't realize it was the beginning of an affair. On the way home, after driving past the low scrub pines and palms and sea oats, the sand creeping onto the road along the edges, the sky an infinite blue haze, he reached for her, his hand knowing and soft around her fingers.

“You are lovely,” he said.

She blushed so fiercely she had to turn toward her window to hide her face. She felt her heart thunder ahead. She had never considered she would date again after Glenn, never thought she would feel the melting heat of a man's attention.

A trio of pelicans arrowed low across the road.

“I suppose I should say goodbye,” she said, as he pulled up to her condo.