The Find (24 page)

‘Look,' Vik said, ‘is Scott around? Can I have a word with him?' Before she knew it, she had slammed the receiver back into the set.

‘He always thinks he knows best!' she yelled at Scott on her way upstairs.

Vik called right back.

‘Scott? I didn't want to upset Anna, but I'm concerned — after all this time telling no one a thing, it seems as if she might be losing her sense of what's prudent. Maybe you have some influence?'

‘I guess she has to do it her way. The people at the museum seem pretty cool.'

‘Scott,' Vik's voice was tight, ‘how much experience do you have of the politics and backbiting that goes on in an academic institution? And, I've got to wonder, where are you in all this? Where are you coming from?'

‘I am your sister's lover,' Scott said, and there were several seconds of complete silence on the end of the line before they both hung up.

‘He thinks you're after my money,' Anna explained, ‘but he's trained to think that way.'

‘Oh, so okay then. No problem!' he said and it was scream or laugh: they laughed, standing in front of the window she'd flung open, with the crescent moon bright in the sky and the cold gushing in like a liquid form of light.

‘I wouldn't care if you were,' she said. Though for him it was not comfortable: he had picked up some work but she had twice paid off his credit card. The second time had been a large amount because he'd bought a laptop on sale. And of course she had paid for the courses she had insisted he sign up for. Many were online, but for English, he'd had to join in with the regular high school class in town, twenty-two kids and just one other adult, Norah, seventy-two, wild white hair thinning over a bright pink scalp, who did one course at a time to keep her brain ticking over. Norah and Scott sat together right at the front of the class, and he drove her home at the end of it. The fact was he needed a vehicle of his own, and Anna would get him one — not new, but something he could live with.

She paid for the ski trip, too: three days, taking Frankie and Sam with them to give their parents a break. Scott was shocked by how much he liked it — the drive up through the snow, the weird superclean, overwarm apartment painted almost white to match the outside, the fireplace, and couches, the huge window full of blue sky and mountain, and then, outside, the bite of the air and the sudden freedom of movement, gliding on the skis he had borrowed from Vik towards the lifts, ahead of him the two waist-high kids with their short legs spread absurdly wide. He was grateful that his own legs remembered what to do.

At the end of the first day, they simmered in a vast hot tub, the steam rising all around, and their hair froze on the way back in, even though their feet were still hot.

The kids were booked in at the ski school and so they went higher, into the blues and then the blacks, the slope vertical-seeming, dizzying if you let yourself think that way, but he turned to her and said, ‘Right?' and she pushed away. It was still the same, all flow, looking ahead, feeling her way towards the turns and seeing how fast it could be. They each knew where the other was and they wove across each other's paths as they sped on down. All around, other goggled people in other bright jackets wove their way down too, and the entire resort was like some kind of machine in perpetual motion. The snowflakes that started to fall in the afternoon were just another part of it and stopping, stillness, was impossible. At the end of the day they were too tired to speak or sit and fell asleep with the kids in their bed with the TV on.

She could still do it. Scott was right: there was nothing wrong with her at all and in the white glare of the snow, in its vastness and strangeness, they forgot everything else that was happening or might be, talked only of the qualities of snow, the runs, of where to go next and tomorrow, what to eat. But on the last day, they dropped the kids for their lesson and returned to the apartment where their skins surprised them, suddenly colourful in the dazzling light reflected from the white walls and the white outside. Hers was flushed with purples and blues; his had become brown, every hair and scar and crease as if freshly inked.

They lay together on the sofa and listened to Mozart turned up very loud because he found he could actually like it that way.

Six months
, she had predicted at the beginning, that was how long it would last. But now she thought perhaps nine. He would have finished all his courses by then.

‘The heat will go out of it. The situation will sink in. Promise you won't hang in with me out of guilt.' She made him promise formally, say the words aloud, which he did, but somehow managed to make them funny.

‘Have you thought,' she said, ‘that it might only be because of this disease that I've become involved with you in the first place:
disinhibition
, have you thought of that?'

‘No,' he said, taking hold of her foot, letting it wash over him like the music itself.

‘Have you thought you might be just a distraction?' The word
just
he really didn't like. But hell, why not. She was weird and wonderful, brave, beautiful, astounding, addictive: it seemed to him that she deserved a distraction, just as she deserved every one of the teams of scientists and graduate students who were injecting viruses into mouse-brains in order to find a way to turn off the HD gene, or working out just exactly what the mutant protein, Huntingtin, actually did, good or bad, and the drugs people, and all those who have gone before them.

She frowned, studied him some more.

‘What are you—?'

‘What
am I
?'

‘What
are
you doing here with me?' What did she think? He widened his eyes, covered his ears.

‘Listening to your fucking music!'

It snowed as they left the mountain. Frankie and Sam fought in the back of the car all the way home.

‘Shall I drive this monster of yours?' Anna asked as they left Vik and Lesley on the porch and made for the GMC she had surprised him with at Christmas. She laughed at herself as she settled into the too-big driver's seat, got the heat going and set the wipers to scrape off the snow.

Scott pushed his seat back. The aches in his legs reminded him all over again of the whiteout world where nothing mattered except how you took the turn. He plugged into his own sounds, tapped along to the beat.

The road was familiar now: the glittering belt around the city, the sudden emptiness once they turned off. They were going home: that was how he thought of her place now.

The road unreeled ahead of them, dusted white and even quieter than normal. Anna drove on, quite liking the car despite herself. Scott thought how he could sleep, if he wanted to, and thinking it made him want: halfway down a remembered run, his muscles let go, his mind emptied itself. He was almost there, when lights flared to the left.

‘Stop!' he yelled reaching for her arm; there was a terrible noise, and then nothing at all.

—
♦ —

ANNA'S LEG WAS IN A CAST
, and the first time he saw her afterwards she was in a wheelchair with it stuck out in front of her. His head was bandaged and they both were wore neck supports. He had a black eye; her face was puffy and unfamiliar, cross-hatched with small cuts. Her eyes looked smaller than they used to be. She had a patch shaved along the side of her head and a row of ten stitches in the white-blue skin of her scalp. Between them they had five cracked ribs, a quantity of bruises, dislocations and cuts too many to count, but none of it mattered at all, except perhaps, that it hurt to smile. They could be dead. Him, or her, both. Or in a coma, or paralysed, any combination of the above, but here they were. It was, Scott thought, the most amazing piece of luck!

‘Scott—' her voice was muffled by the bandage that covered his ear. He pulled it off.

‘I nearly killed you. I should have accelerated, not—'

‘No. The
truck driver
should have stopped.
He
was speeding. Vik says it's absolutely clear.'

Set free, they staggered out of the hospital doors and into the first of many cabs, their pockets stuffed with appointment cards and rattling with pills, and everything, even the concrete, looked bright and new.

‘Keep all the receipts, everything,' Vik warned them, ‘for the insurance. I will handle all that.'

♦ ♦ ♦

Her hair was a mess as it grew back. Scott shaved his head
to keep her company and when they went together to the
museum the technicians in the preparation room pushed back their masks, turned off their micro-abraders and drills and, in the sudden silence that fell, made feeble jokes about their casts: what strange specimens these were!

‘Are you bringing yourselves in?' Lin asked, offering them both her not-quite smile. ‘Where's the paperwork? Humans being so common, you will be way down the line, I'm afraid.'

A length of pterosaur jaw longer than Scott's arm was partly exposed, revealing a strange bony crest at the end and two rows of sharply pointed teeth, widely spaced. On another bench, the slender bones of the left arm and hand were beginning to emerge from the shale: the gifts of stone.

She worked, but not too much: her report on Big Crow, a couple of documents in connection with the Big Crow River cultural centre. She was working on him, too: improving his math, making sure he scored well in tests. To begin with, he fetched things to save her heaving up out of her chair; she typed for him and even once cut up his food, but then their disabilities, even as they diminished, became part of their lives.

Anna received a handwritten envelope, inside it a card featuring tiny flowers in an arctic meadow.

Dear Anna,
it said.
I am shocked to learn about your health and the recent accident too. I also am going through a very difficult time. I may have been somewhat abrupt in the past and do hope we can forget our previous difficulties. Best wishes from Lily and myself.

Yours truly
, he had signed it,
Mike
. The tribunal, she knew from Greta was only weeks away. She dropped the card in the recycling bin along with the local news, supermarket flyers and credit card company solicitations.

—
♦ —

AN ATHLETIC-LOOKING WOMAN
with dark hair in a knot at the back of her head met them at the door of what could almost have been a private house, but for the health authority sign and the wheelchair ramp outside.

‘Linda Sampson. I remember speaking to you, Anna,' she said, nodding and smiling as they shook hands.

They followed her to a large room with a coffee maker in one corner and some plates covered with Saran wrap laid out on a table by the wall. There was a circle of widely spaced chairs in the middle of the room. Despite it being May now, some tired-looking tinsel from Christmas was still pinned around the windows. It was very warm even with the window wide open.

‘Quite a few partners are coming today,' Linda told Scott. ‘The partners and carers meet informally in here, while the group takes place in the room across from here — for about an hour. Then we all get together for a social at the end.'

‘I believe you were diagnosed quite recently, Anna? Many of the people in the group are further progressed than you. They'll have a lot to pass on.'

There were footsteps in the corridor and voices — a woman's calling out

‘Linda, you in there?' and then the woman herself, plump and flushed, her hair in tight curls; her husband, a gaunt man, hollow-eyed, with a fixed stare, his limbs twitching and jerking, in a strange, endless dance.

‘Gloria and Ian,' Linda said.

‘Everyone's coming,' Gloria told them. ‘Full house today.'

Linda briefly clasped her hand onto Ian's shoulder, and introduced the two couples. She spoke slowly, and gestured at each person as she said the names, and then waited, smiling at Ian.

‘Pleased to— meet you,' he said after a slight delay, the
s
slurred into a shushing sound, the syllables stretched out of shape. Like a drunk, Scott thought. Like Mac used to be.

‘I'm going across to the other room now,' Linda gestured in the direction she was about to take, waited for Ian to accompany her.

Anna squeezed Scott's arm.

‘Okay?' she asked, and then, before he could say no, she joined Ian and Linda. He was on his own.

People came noisily along the corridor and into the room, the women putting plates of food on the table and hanging their purses over the backs of chairs.

‘This is Scott. His wife, Anna, has just been diagnosed,' Gloria said and the newcomers shook Scott's hand, hugged each other and went to get coffee. Most people were middle-aged women but Jade — her skin powdered white, hair dyed black, three studs in one side of her nose — was probably still in high school, or could have been. She wore black with a purple poncho on top.

‘So you're still in shock, then,' she said. ‘I bring my dad. He drives mum nuts and we don't get to town much, so she's shopping.'

‘Nuts?' Gloria called out, her curls bobbing as she threw her head back. ‘Tell me about it.' Others nearby laughed too. ‘He
still
won't give up. And he can't do anything much, but it's really upsetting, you know — when you do think, sometimes, at the end of the day that you'd like someone to snuggle up with. And you can remember how you started out.' She teared up briefly, and then shrugged. ‘That was another life. What we do a lot of in this group,' she continued, looking at Scott, ‘is
complain
. But today, we'll try hard to keep it in check, because you are new, okay?' There was more laughter.

‘How are things, Jo?' Gloria asked a tired-looking woman with long mousy hair in a loose French braid. It was impossible to tell her age.

‘Well, I've made progress,' she said. ‘I made word cards, like Linda mentioned in the email, and we're really getting through. His frustration level's gone way down. He's almost himself.'

‘The thing is,' said the trim, silver-haired man next to Scott, ‘you have the muscular problems, but also the cognitive deficit, and speech is where they come together, you really have to work to get through. But you can, that's the thing, you can. I'm Carl,' he said, offering a hand. ‘How long have you and your wife been together?'

‘We're not married. We met last year,' Scott said. But time, he reminded himself, was not the point. What happened in it is what matters. A minute could matter more than a month. ‘She's got no symptoms,' he said.

‘Good,' Carl smiled. ‘That's good.' Some kind of shouting, a ragged sound, reached them from across the corridor.

‘Chants,' Carl said, reaching in his jacket for his wallet and flipping it open. ‘That's how they begin. There she is.' A woman in a low-cut evening dress with an up-do and earrings looked out of the tiny photograph.

‘Twenty-five years,' Carl said. ‘Last eight have been a challenge. Gave up work, and so on. Big change. Daughter helps when she can but she's got her own problems. You get to know how you feel…what's important.' Jade tapped Scott on the arm.

‘Can't smoke in here,' she said. ‘Want one?' Scott went out with her anyhow, stood on the porch while she blew out gusts of fragrant smoke.

‘My grandmother used to live with us, and she died of it. One of my uncles has it and my aunt is getting it too. It scared me when I was a kid. Now I think, okay, he's the same Dad underneath it.

‘You have to have a sense of humour. Get one if you don't already. Have a laugh. It's okay. I might get tested in a year or two...dunno. Have to see.'

Back inside, Jade made for the washroom. Scott passed the closed door to the other room and stood outside. What was she doing in there? Why had she insisted on this?

Before he knew it, he'd opened the door.

There were more people than he'd expected. He couldn't see Anna, just the backs of heads and a man sitting opposite the door in an armchair, his fingers rising and falling as if he were conducting an underwater orchestra. The man next to him had a bruise on his face and was saying how he hated not to drive anymore.

At last Scott saw her, over to the left, sitting with her hands in her lap and leaning forward to listen, her eyes very bright.

‘Is something the matter, Scott?' Linda asked, coming over to the door. ‘Distractions create anxiety. Please don't interrupt us.'

Carl was explaining his exercise regime.

‘Every morning, I get Sonia up,' he said, ‘and I go. Five miles. If the weather's bad, I have a treadmill in the basement. Endorphins. It's the key.'

‘I don't blame anyone,' Angela said when Carl went over to talk to Gloria, ‘but there just aren't many men who hang in like Carl has. Josef—' she pointed to a man of about thirty, skinny, balding, with several earrings in one ear, who stood by the coffee urn, ‘He's a Home Care Assistant.'

Names and faces were beginning to blur by the time Linda appeared at the door. Some went to help their partners, and others pulled the film off the plates and started to fill a cluster of spouted baby cups that had appeared by the drinks. Anna came in just after the man who was talking about not driving — Con, it turned out, who was with Angela. She helped him into a chair, leaned over and put her cheek next to his.

Anna put her arm around Scott, asked for the second time if he was okay.

Anna took Scott around the room, introduced him to Amy, in the wheelchair, to Keith — bright-eyed, beaming — who intended to compete in a triathlon in the spring.

‘I'll email Anna a regime. Cardiovascular work and antioxidants.'

Everyone was talking at once. Sausage rolls, quiches, cookies and pieces of chocolate cake did the rounds. Not everyone ate.

Andy was a blob of a man in a t-shirt that said he was
Not mad, but getting there
. His wife left him and despite his symptoms he was still looking after two teenaged kids: ‘We work it out. Keeps me going.'

Greg, Sharon, Ben. Company director. Teacher. Unemployed.

Carl was sitting next to a bone-thin woman in a wheelchair who looked twenty years older than him and nothing at all like the Sonia in the photograph.

How long? was what Scott suddenly wanted to know. How long did it take to get like this?

‘People are getting tired and time's running out for those of you who came on the bus. Let's have our song.'

Gloria stepped forward, looked around and began. Her voice poured out of her: it was like a creature that lived locked inside her and had been let out for a rare minute or two.
I'm singin' in the rain, just singin' in the rain...
Her eyes moved around the room, settling briefly on someone and then moving on. Before the end of the second line, other people were joining her: high wavering voices, grumbles in the boots, monotones. Scott raised an eyebrow at Anna, and then thought
Why not?

I'm laughin' at clouds… So dark up above...

He heard Anna's voice, high but steady, part of the inner core of coherence surrounded by the notes that were off, the notes two beats too late:
Come on with the rain, I've a smile on my face.
Some people meant it, some hammed it up and somehow, it sounded all right:
Just singin', singin' in the rain!

After the applause at the end people gathered up their belongings and prepared for a mass exodus for the disability buses outside.

‘Do you celebrate Easter?' Carl asked, his hand on Sonia's shoulder. ‘My daughter will be visiting. And I'm taking a short break with a lady friend of mine, someone I met online.' He winked, made for the door.

‘So very difficult,' Anna said in bed that night, ‘to know I must change so much.'

‘But when it happens, you'll be good at it.' He said
when
but was thinking
not yet,
and he was also thinking
if
, because it was true that at any point there could be a breakthrough: if not cure, treatment. Thinking
if
did not mean that he was running away from things. In a way, it was more realistic, not less. You had to hold it all in your mind at once and it was hard to do.

Later he sat up in bed while Anna slept. His head was full of the people from the meeting: Carl and Sonia, Jade, Gloria, and also of the people he and Anna might each become.

He thought, too, of his father, now living a sober life with Orianna, attending church every week, meetings every day, and, because of Orianna's seasonal affective disorder, already planning next winter's trip south to an apartment in Puerto Vallarta she could borrow from a friend of her daughter's.
Perhaps you and your lady-friend will visit us, son.
Maybe it wouldn't last, but who would have thought it could happen at all?

It was strange to think of himself as say, ten years older. Heavier, the first lines. The way he felt and saw things would change slowly, over a period of time, likewise for Anna, and then a day would come when they had to acknowledge that it had become something different. He had to accept that what was between them now would in the end turn, as one of the booklets Anna had sent for from the society had explained, into
a relationship of dependency and care, which is often very difficult for one or both partners to adjust to.

He understood why she had insisted on going to the meeting, even though they had no need of it yet, why she had put herself through it, for him. She's telling me I can leave, he thought. I can leave tomorrow, if I want to and I know she won't blame me.

Yet he didn't want to. He wanted to go all the way. Further out, deeper in, and on to the bitter end, which he would somehow make sweet.