Mercy Train (15 page)

“My flight's coming in a little earlier than I told you. Three o'clock. Are you sure you're okay to drive to Fort Myers? I can take a shuttle or cab or something. I wouldn't mind at all.”

“Samantha. I can pick you up. I would like to pick you up.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Do you still drink that Diet Coke?”

Iris felt her weakness lift a little in the cool air.

“Yeah,” Samantha said. “I'm not supposed to. I told Jack I quit but I still do.”

“Good. I got some for you, just in case. I won't tell on you.”

“The baby is crazy today. Rolling around. Jabbing me with her elbows.”

“Theo was like that. I'm convinced his personality was set by the time he came screaming out, butt first.”

“You know they don't deliver breech anymore. Automatic C-section. God, I really don't want a C-section.”

“You'll be fine. I'm sorry I won't be there, though.”

“You might? You don't know.” Samantha's voice grew shrill.

Unspoken was how long Samantha would be staying, how long Iris would live. Iris did not want her daughter's martyrdom.

“I'm sorry to pull you away from your work,” Iris said.

She was astounded, sometimes, by what her daughter could make with her hands and raw clay. Where did talent come from? Iris wondered if she herself had some latent ability that was never activated. Gardening or chess or watercolors or poetry. She couldn't even knit, though her mother had tried to teach her again and again.

“I had to stop the wheel,” Samantha said. “My belly made it too awkward.”

“You'll start up again soon after the baby. You must make yourself get back to it. Remember that. The longer you wait, the harder it will be. Before Theo I was a whiz at the harmonica.”

Samantha laughed. “I'm not worried,” she said. “I'm already anxious to get back to work.”

Iris closed her eyes against a headache that pressed behind her eyes.

“You don't know what you'll be like. You can't know.”

She could sense her daughter chafe. It seemed they always reached this point, this brittle place.

“You'll be fine,” Iris said again.

*   *   *

Iris's mother had been an orphan who'd never known her parents. It had not been a secret, but neither had it been openly discussed.

“Do you think about who your parents might have been?” Iris had asked her once, as they had fished for rock bass on a late summer Sunday afternoon. The sun burned their arms and faces, while their feet were numb in the river water. Iris didn't care much if her line got a nibble, but she loved to sit next to her mother, listening to the rush of water over the smooth stones in the shallows, relishing the moments of cool and clarity when clouds obscured the sun's glare. And her mother, here, with her.

“Why, sure,” her mother said. Her hair was gray and pulled back in a ponytail. She only wore it down when she went to bed. “About my mother sometimes. But there's not a lot of use in it, is there?”

“Maybe she was a movie star,” Iris said.

Her mother laughed. “I don't think so. They didn't have movies in the eighteen hundreds.”

Iris wanted to know what the orphanage had been like—she imagined white rooms with tall windows and nuns floating down quiet hallways—but her mother was vague and deflective. “I don't remember much about it,” she would say. “That was a long time ago.” At age eleven she'd been taken on as kitchen help at a small private hospital in Wisconsin, where she had learned how to make all those fussy desserts. She'd lived and worked there until she was eighteen, married Samuel Olsen, and moved across the border to Minnesota.

“There's no way of finding out?” Iris pressed. “You could write to the orphanage maybe and ask about who she was.”

“We should get going,” her mother said, winding the reel of her fishing rod. “It must be well past two. I need you to shell that batch of peas.”

“Just a little longer. Please? I haven't even caught one yet.”

Her mother laughed. “Your worm's been off your hook for an hour.”

Iris could feel time moving on, her mother already going over what needed to be done back at the house. There wouldn't be time for this again for a long time with fall closing in.

“You have ten more minutes,” her mother said. “I mean it. Don't be late.”

“Do you think Bobby Bergesen will ask me to the dance?” Iris asked, in a transparent attempt to forestall her mother, who had already picked up her basket of fish and was dusting off her skirt.

“Iris,” she said. “All my information on the matter comes from you. Do you think he's going to ask you to the dance?”

“No. Maybe,” Iris had stuttered. “I don't know. He waved to me in town the other day.”

Her mother shook her head, always flummoxed by Iris's theatrics.

“I wouldn't worry so much about it.”

“But I like him,” Iris had said, putting her palms to her cheeks.

“Boys will come and go,” her mother had said, less to Iris than the river.

Iris remembered even now how there had been no conviction in her voice, no weary “mother knows best” authority, only opaque wistfulness, a window into which Iris was not privy. She wondered if on some level all mothers were ciphers to their children. She wondered if having children was a way to try and understand one's own mother, to bridge the unknowability. How she wished she could know her mother now. Iris didn't believe in heaven, but lately she indulged a childish notion of seeing her mother again. She liked the idea of the two of them being old women together.

Iris unhooked her bra and shimmied her arms out of the straps. It fell heavy into her lap.

Outside on the landing was the familiar trudge of the mailman—redheaded Albert, who never wore a hat in the sun and never thanked her for the check she left for him every Christmas—the clang of her metal mailbox closing, and then his retreat.

Iris wondered what her mother would have thought about Samantha's now living in Wisconsin. It was a return of sorts. Her mother would have liked that her granddaughter made things, that she was an artisan.

Iris picked herself up to retrieve the mail—a sad little stack—and went to the kitchen. Could it be that she actually felt hungry? She wanted peanut butter and jelly. She pulled the jars from one of the grocery bags, still on the floor where she'd left them, and slathered peanut butter, then strawberry jelly on two pieces of soft white bread. Salty, sweet, soft, creamy comfort. Why hadn't she been eating this for every meal?

She flipped the bank statement, credit card offers, and Planned Parenthood donation solicitation into the trash—she'd have to pretend to recycle when Samantha was there—and slid open the Lively Arts calendar of upcoming events.

Community theater performance of
West Side Story
. Pass. Children's chorus. Pass. The Ying Quartet: Tchaikovsky. Almost three weeks away, just before her birthday. Surely she could make it that long, now that she'd rediscovered peanut butter. Henry was a sucker for Tchaikovsky. It would be her opportunity to see him again. She dialed the box office and reserved two tickets. Samantha would be her date.

Iris picked up her book from the counter where she'd placed it earlier. Her run-in with Stephen seemed like days ago. She had noticed in the last week that she was losing control of her sense of time, stretching here, warping there, a gradual meandering off the track. She would have to write herself a note about Samantha's arrival, just in case. She slid open the door to the balcony and stepped from the dry cool air into a blanket of humid warmth. She eased into a chaise and joined Mrs. Ramsay, knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper's son, after the children were in bed.

She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

Yes. Iris thought of her mother and believed now that she had welcomed some time alone before she died. And here Iris was, in Sanibel after marriage and motherhood and a last-minute affair, at home in a quiet loneliness. It was not happiness, no. But it was humility. It was acceptance.

Her eyes were heavy with narcotics, and she set the book down. Her energy had fizzled. Her limbs felt limp, her bones like lead, bearing down on her muscles and skin with each movement. Her head was throbbing again, blurring the edge of her vision with each pulse. Even her lungs ached. As a child she had sometimes fantasized about being bedridden with some serious sickness, her face rosy with fever, her mother and father fussing over her, talking in hushed tones, nursing her back to health.

How foolish. Illness was so inelegant, she thought, so messy and ugly, so unromantic. Getting to death was going to be awful. This slipping away, this erosion of body and, finally, mind.

She pulled herself out of the chair to go take her pills. In the kitchen she shook the colorful tablets in her palm. How many would it take to get the job done?

 

SAM

Iris had once said, “You will be a good mother because you want to be a mother.”

Sam pulled her car into the parking lot behind the Sunrise Inn. She wondered now if her mother's cryptic pronouncement had meant
she
had not wanted to be a mother. Or maybe ten years after Theo, Iris had not wanted to be a mother again. But she hadn't been a bad mother, had she? Distant, perhaps, preoccupied. It's true that Sam had often felt lonesome as a child. Iris had seemed much more comfortable with Sam as an adult than Sam as a little girl, whom she had looked at with perplexity, as if to say, How did you get here?

Up close, the beige bricks of the motel were dirt- and water-stained in the exposing light of the afternoon sun. Grim, Sam thought. A young father in low-slung jeans, a tank top under an open North Face parka, herded two little boys, also in puffy jackets, inside a bottom-floor room, and she wondered if the Sunrise, like many of the cheap motels in the area, was used as backup for an inadequate shelter system.

She couldn't say why she had returned to this place. Maybe the starkness of the life she imagined for the girl was the dark draw. The fragility of our trajectories, Sam thought, the downward momentum of a few bad breaks. She made fists with her hands to warm her fingertips.

*   *   *

Unlike other pregnant women she had known, Sam had not felt overheated, had not thrown off covers at night or walked around in shirtsleeves as temperatures dipped. Her hands had often been cold. This made her nervous that there was something wrong with this pregnancy, too, despite the fact that the chorionic villus sampling test done at twelve weeks—she would not wait for an amnio—had shown that the baby, a girl, was genetically fine. So she was glad for the soft heat and the blurry humidity of Florida after the early mean freeze she had left in Wisconsin. Despite the circumstances, she was glad to be warm.

When she and Iris drove from the airport en route to Sanibel Island, they passed a small billboard on I-75 with the smiling moon face of a Down syndrome baby, his almond eyes with the characteristic epicanthic eyelid folds. In childlike writing it said, “I deserve to live!”

Sam—driving so her mother could rest—shook her head faintly and felt a cold wave creep down to her toes. She had hoped that when she became pregnant again the first pregnancy would somehow reshape in her mind, fading into the miscarriage everyone else thought it had been. She hated that she felt guilt about a choice she had defended the right to make her entire adult life. But it had not been an unwanted pregnancy, and eighteen weeks was not five weeks, and when it came down to it, she had put herself first. She had not wanted the life of taking care of a special needs child, whatever that entailed. She'd immediately thrown out the packet of information on Down syndrome given to her by the nurse, not wanting to know anything. She was selfish and shallow, a coward. Was it really more important to be able to make another set of dinner plates?

Sam had read an article about a woman who gave her adopted son back after a month because she didn't feel any bond with the eighteen-month-old and thought it would be best for everyone if he went to a different home. She and her husband had tried for years to have their own child, and what they really wanted was a child formed from their genetic material, a reflection of them. The public outrage had been swift and damning—Sam and Jack had even discussed how traumatic it must have been for the toddler—but quietly she had wondered if this was any more reprehensible than what she had done.

Jack would say it had been a five-inch fetus, an organism that couldn't live outside the body. And even if they had had the child, there was a chance he might have been severely disabled, never able to dress or feed himself. She knew all these things, agreed with them, and yet, and yet. Jack might also say she could not let it go because it gave her something to hate herself for, a wound to poke at. That is, he might say these things if she ever talked about it with him, which she didn't.

“How are you feeling these days?” her mother asked, eyes closed. “You barely look pregnant.”

“I don't?” Sam immediately leaped to worry.

“Oh, not in a bad way, honey,” Iris said, opening her eyes and perking her head up. “Like you haven't gained too much weight. I gained fifty pounds with you. I ate donuts and hot fudge sundaes. It took me a whole year to lose it. But boy, was it fun.”

Sam smiled, looking quickly at her mother, and turned onto the causeway. She didn't know how long her mother would live. Iris was cagey about what the doctor had said, calling any estimate maudlin and unnecessary. “I'll die when I die,” she had said. But would it be days, weeks, months?