Ragged Company (33 page)

“Yes. You’re Jonas.”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Jonas,” she said and smiled.

The smile cut me. It was like the moment when the wick on a candle springs to life, peeling the darkness back to reveal the world to you again. Sylvan’s smile. My Sylvan’s smile. I grabbed the top of the handrail again because all she did was smile.

“Mr. Hohnstein?” the man asked, standing and reaching out to shake my hand.

I shook my head to stop myself from staring at my wife five feet away from me. “Yes?” I asked.

“Mr. Hohnstein, I’m Phillip Greer. I’m Sylvan’s husband.” He held his hand out to me, waiting for a reaction. “Maybe you should come into the house and sit down. You and your friends. Sylvan, dear, let’s take these people into the living room and have a visit.”

“Yes,” she said. “A visit. A visit would be nice. Coffee and some cake, maybe.”

Greer held the door open and I watched as she rose slowly, small hands clutching the blanket around her. She smiled at my friends gathered behind me and as she passed she looked at me. I saw those incredible blue eyes and I felt something warm and pliant rip smoothly apart again inside my chest. She grinned. She grinned and passed wordlessly, following Greer into the house.
Sylvan. It meant quiet. Peaceful, pastoral, tranquil as a forest glade, an idyll, a calm and undisturbed wood, rife with shadow, light, and mystery. All I felt as she passed was the mystery.

I walked through the door watching her back. She didn’t move the same. I saw that right away. The Sylvan I knew moved with an assured step like she was in tune with everything around her. This woman walked carefully, as though she didn’t want to disturb anything, as though she needed it all to remain where it was, as if walking a planned route. Greer pointed us to chairs and a sofa and we all sat, my friends staring at me for clues as to how to move or what to say. Greer made Sylvan comfortable in a big easy chair, plumping pillows behind her back, setting her feet on a round cushioned ottoman and covering them with the blanket. He moved like he was used to watching over her, like he cared, like he loved her. I felt a spear of jealousy rack my insides.

The room was lovely. Rustic and charming. There was a fireplace with silk flowers adorning the mantle and a Gainsboroughlike painting of countryside under huge billowed clouds. The furniture was all wood and cloth like an old country home, and there were pillows everywhere. Pillows on the sofa, pillows on the chairs, pillows in a pile on the floor, and pillows leaning on shelves.

Greer watched as I looked at them.

“She likes pillows,” he said. “I don’t know why. It’s just one of the things she latched on to right away and it’s like she can’t ever have enough of them. We have more pillows in this house than air.”

“No books,” I said.

“What’s that?” Greer asked.

“There’s no books. She loved books. She was a librarian.”

“I didn’t know that,” he said. “There’s a lot I don’t know, really. Maybe you can help with that.”

I looked at him. He was a soft man. Tall, stocky enough for the height, with a slight bulge of belly, glasses, balding, with wide hands and feet. But soft. He’d have never made it on the street.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I can do.”

“Maybe I can clear up some things for you, Mr. Hohnstein. Sylvan functions with a memory that clicks on and off like a broken switch. Some days it works and other days it doesn’t. I never know when I wake up in the morning what I’m going to have to tell her, what I’m going to have to introduce her to again. It’s like trying to keep something on a slippery surface. You never know if it’s going to stick or slide.

“She seems to hold on to activities better. Actions. She can remember how to do things, the repetitive things we all do, but she can’t remember why. I have to tell her to wash. I have to tell her to change her clothes. Some days I even have to tell her to dress. Things like that.”

“But she remembers me?” I asked.

He sighed. “You,” he said. “You are the face of hope. Dr. MacBeth told me when I started to take care of Sylvan to put your picture where she could see it every day. It was his hope that something would click for her. Something that would start all the tumblers rolling back into place. That’s why there’s a picture of you in every room. In the hope that she would one day remember.”

“She doesn’t?”

“No. She doesn’t. She just knows your face and she knows your name because we told her over and over again in the beginning.”

“We?”

“Dr. MacBeth and I. I was Sylvan’s physiotherapist after the accident and at the extended care home. When she moved here I came with her to be her live-in care. We were together for such a long time and I watched her fight to get her body back, watched her fight to get the world back in some kind of order she could handle. I fell in love with her. We were married three years ago.”

“But I’m her husband,” I said dumbly.

“Dr. MacBeth took power of attorney for Sylvan. When you disappeared and didn’t return, someone had to take care of her needs and the doctor wanted to do that. He loved her too. When it looked like you’d never resurface, he put the divorce papers through
in absentia.
”

“
In absentia?
”

“Yes. You were nowhere to be found. The court considered the fact that you hadn’t been heard from for seven years and made it official. I have the papers somewhere upstairs.”

“No need. I understand. Does she understand?”

“She doesn’t need to,” Greer said. “I’ve always been here, Mr. Hohnstein. Through everything. Through all that time. All those years. All that struggle. You weren’t. You weren’t there when she had night terrors and cried and needed to be held, to be told that she was safe, that she was going to be okay. You weren’t there for the bedpans, the walkers, the back braces, the massages, the ten-minutes-to-take-three-stairs ordeals, none of it. You weren’t there to teach her to wash herself, to potty train her, to teach her about knives and forks and spoons again, to teach her how to cross the street. But I was. I was. And I’m sorry if that sounds like anger and judgment, but I love her. I love her. I loved her through all of that and I didn’t disappear. That’s all she needs to understand; that I’ve always been here and that I always will be.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I knew there was a small chance you’d resurface someday. I don’t know why but I just knew. Maybe because I know what love is and I understand how much torture you went through when yours was wiped away. Maybe because I know that once it’s planted in your chest and sinks its roots right into your being, it never goes away, never stops trying to find the light again. Maybe because I know that you loved her. Perhaps as much as I do right now. Maybe more.”

“What makes you so sure of that? I ran. How much love does that take?”

“Look in the corner.”

“What?”

“Look in the corner,” he said again, and pointed to the far corner by the sliding glass doors that led to a back patio.

Eudora. The jade plant. She was huge, almost unrecognizable from when I last saw her, but I knew it was her. She was more of
a bush than a plant now, round and thick with a gnarled trunk that spoke of years and time. She sat in a large red clay pot, looking content in her spot by the sundeck. I walked over to her and let my fingers trail across the rich buds of leaves, remembering the nights alone on the cold hardwood floor of our home when I’d slept with my arms wrapped around her.

“Eudora,” Sylvan said. “That’s Eudora.”

“Yes,” I said, turning to face her. “Eudora. You gave her that name.”

“Me?” she asked. “Why?”

“Because there was a great writer named Eudora. A woman. When you read her stories to me, you told me she sounded like mist on the bayou.”

“Eudora told stories?”

“Yes. Very well.”

She looked at Greer. “You never told me that.”

“I didn’t know, dear,” he said.

“Oh,” she said quietly, and looked back at me.

“You left that plant by her bedside, Mr. Hohnstein. Now, I can’t tell you what was going through your mind but I do know that it was a loving thing to do. Maybe it was the only loving thing you had left to do. I don’t know. But that action told me a lot about how much you loved Sylvan. That you would leave a reminder even though you didn’t believe she could ever be reminded. Hope against hope. Against all odds. Love.”

“I don’t even remember leaving it,” I said. “I was drunk when I left. I stayed drunk a long time.”

Greer looked at me and nodded. “I guessed. I read the history and I know that you had to sell everything in order to provide for her. I know that you had to sell your home. And I guessed that Eudora was the last thing left and you left it with Sylvan. Where did you go?”

“Down.”

“Yes. And why come back now?”

“No choice.”

“I see. What did you hope to achieve?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just needed to see her. Needed to know that she was all right. Needed to know that what I did wasn’t my curse. My failing.”

“She doesn’t remember. Anything. Nothing of that life before the accident. She doesn’t even know there was an accident. She just woke up to a new life that had its starting point in a hospital bed. How you feel about what you did is your business, but I know that she bears no feeling for you. No love, no malice, no need. Nothing. She can’t. It’s beyond her.”

“Can I ask her?”

Greer studied me for a moment. There was nothing in his eyes but concern. I felt like if I made any sort of wrong move, he would plant himself dully in my path. He looked at me and I knew that I was being studied, not as any kind of threat, not as any kind of competition, but as a man looking for a straw, the one that provides just enough buoyancy to keep you from slipping under, away, down, gone. “Go ahead,” he said. “For what it’s worth. Okay, ask her.”

I looked at the others. They sat like stones, watching, listening, waiting for any sign from me that they needed to move in, surround me, plant themselves as obdurately in front of me as Greer was planted in front of Sylvan. Amelia nodded. I moved forward.

The room was like an ocean. The carpet was a placid sea and I was a mariner adrift in the doldrums, seeing the shore in his mind’s eye but incapable of getting there. Sylvan sat calmly with her hands folded in her lap, looking at Greer and then at me adrift there on my isotropic sea, the going back and the moving on appearing to be the same direction. When I moved, she grinned at me. A small girl’s grin. Each step closer brought a crash of memories like waves on the beach and I felt myself floating among them, bobbing helplessly, flotsam, jetsam, at the whim of the surf.

Sylvan on a Christmas morning waiting in her chair while I carried a present festooned with ribbons toward her. Sylvan in a camp chair high in the mountains beside our tent, her chin pointed upward into the breeze, eyes closed and sighing while I
brought her coffee in a steaming mug. Sylvan demurely seated in a concert hall, one leg folded over the other, the trails of her evening dress dropping to the floor, and me standing in the aisle with a program, seeing the symphony of her. Sylvan in her chair at the library, head bent over text, the walls crammed with the spines of books, then seeing me and smiling, her one hand gesturing to the room, to the words, to the stories, to the idea of so many possible worlds. Sylvan sleeping in her armchair, a book slumped against her chest, her fingers entwined around it, Horowitz playing Brahms in the background and me leaning in the doorway watching her, learning how to breathe.

I reached down, put my hands gently under her ankles and lifted them, placing her feet on the floor and hitching the ottoman closer to her before I sat down. She smiled. I felt a large, agonized lump in my throat and the saline wash of tears in my eyes and on my tongue. I took a moment and smoothed the blanket over her knees. She sat there and grinned at me, waiting. Then I took her hands. Took her soft, lined hands in mine and traced their backs with the pads of my thumbs. These were the hands that once gave structure to my world, the hands that taught me how to carve a life out of the shapeless lump that it was, the hands that coaxed emotion and feeling out of skin that had never known the touch of such magic, the hands that cupped the universe and held it out to me like a folded thing, showing me how to open it slowly, easily, outward into its glory like an origami bird. I felt them. Felt their warmth, their satin promise, their stories. One large tear fell from my eye and landed on the back of her wrist. I massaged it dry with my thumb and struggled to hold back the deluge I felt building inside me.

“You’re sad,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied, tight-lipped.

“Why?” she asked quietly.

I looked at her. She sat in the chair, squinting at me like she had always done, the pinched look that brought together all of her focus, all of her attentiveness, all of her energy, so that you knew you existed, really and truly existed, existed to the exclusion of all
else in that one glorious moment. I choked back tears and tried to smile bravely.

“Because time has hands,” I said.

“Hands? Like a clock?”

“Yes. Like that. You can watch them move but it’s only after you’ve been gone somewhere, after you’ve left something and come back to it, that you can feel them.”

“Are they soft hands?”

“No. Not really. They’re heavy.”

“You’re sad because they’re heavy?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “I feel heavy sometimes. Sad. Sad, and I don’t know why. Sad for something I can’t remember.”

“You do?”

“Yes. It’s funny. It just comes over me sometimes. Kneeling in the garden or walking on the beach or even watching a show on television. I’ll just feel sad. Just for a moment. Just enough to know I’m sad and then it’s gone again. Like time put its hands on me.”

“Yes. Me too.”

“You’re a nice man.”

“I hope so. I haven’t felt like a nice man for a long time.”

“Because you left something?”

I looked up expecting to see that focused look, to become captured in it again. But all I saw were the eyes of a child, fascinated, curious, asking questions just to get to another question. And I knew.