We walked down to the end of the road, and then home across the Sank and through the yards of WesterLee and Meadowlea. I peered into the houses, at rooms of fantastical white creatures, oddly shaped, nothing like either real furniture or real animals. Some of the configurations made me smile, as did the lengths people went to—or told their servants to go to—to protect valuable surfaces from the fearsome ravages of dust. Things were packed up as carefully as they’d be in English country houses, though there wasn’t much here worth protecting. It occurred to me that a children’s book might be written about these creatures. It could be from the point of view of animals in winter, a squirrel hanging upside down from the roof and peering in, or a herd of deer or moose quietly walking by. They’d wonder if these sheet creatures were a new species come to town. Each of them would greet the newcomers and ask them to come out to play, but the creatures wouldn’t respond. This would happen over and over until one day they’d walk by and the creatures would be gone; people would have returned; and in the houses there’d be nothing to see but furniture. The animals would move away into the woods for the summer, but when fall came again they’d creep back up to the houses and look in at their silent friends.
I took it as a good omen for Nan that I had had an idea that she’d enjoy hearing.
At the hospital I headed straight to the ICU, only peripherally aware of the corridors, the nursing station, the beeps and clatters of the place. Before I went to the waiting room to greet Virgil—manners, again—I stopped at Nan’s room. The heap on the floor I became was only a vague sensation, and still is. The pain of hitting the tile, being picked up, spoken to, and told that no, she wasn’t dead—she hadn’t passed, was how the nurse put it; she’d only been moved out of the ICU into a real room, isn’t that good news—all happened as far from me as fear can exile a person from herself. I was numb and didn’t feel the mercurochrome or the stitches. I rested on a cot until a nurse came and spoke to me and then a doctor did the same and I was told I was all right and could get up.
I wasn’t all right. I’d received a deep shock, worse even than the accident. My mind assumed an empty room meant death.
A nurse led me to Nan’s new room in the children’s ward. Bright pictures and children’s drawings hung along the walls in the halls. Gingerly, I entered her room, for fear of scaring or waking her. The lights had been turned off, and the atmosphere was warm and gray. I made out the shape of a bed jutting out from the center of the far wall. Far fewer machines and fewer lines worked in and around her, and no ventilator loomed behind her. She alone made her small chest rise and fall. I crossed to her and bent over to hold her—not an embrace, but just a light touch on her arms. Her body was thick with castings, but the swelling in her face had lessened. Over the past days I’d often compared her utter stillness to the cabinet cards we had in our house from decades past of small children who hadn’t survived—children who at first glance appeared to be asleep, yet on a closer look, could be seen to lack the vitality that inhabits a face even in the depths of sleep. Nan looked alive. Her hair lay smooth on the pillow. Someone had brushed it.
I spoke quietly to her, on the assumption that at some level she could hear. I have no idea what I said. Sweet nothings. Encouragements. I held her hands in mine, lay my head on her heart, murmured and reassured, while gradually becoming aware of a sound behind me, throaty and low. A cough. I whirled around. There was Virgil, sitting mutely against the far wall, watching me. Had he been there the whole time? I felt angry and vulnerable. Yet I didn’t want him to know even that much about me.
I glanced at him, and he slid his eyes to the side.
“You must be very pleased. Look how much better she is. Aren’t you happy for that?” I was closer to him than I’d ever been, so close I smelled him, his ragged clothes, his unwashed hair and beard. Who was he to designate himself such an exception to the norms of civility?
He nodded without meeting my eye.
“I fainted earlier when I didn’t see her in the ICU. I was afraid…” I stopped, and considered how harsh it would sound. “I was afraid she’d died overnight.” I stared at him, but he didn’t look up. “But here we are, in life as we’ve known it lately. I’ve brought soup and bread today.” Did I mention I have been feeding him? Or I should say Mrs. Circumstance has.
“Thank you.”
His muted acknowledgment, his labored nod, brought up through my veins a boiling anger, the accumulation of a lifetime of caretaking and doing for others tasks no one wanted, whether paid for or obliged to perform, of being thanked in words that can’t even touch on what it means to be a living person stuck in the yawning time register of impending death. How was it that he could see me arrive day after day and show a parental level of devotion to his child, and a neighborly sense of consideration toward him, and not even—what? Write me a thank-you note? What did I expect?
I wanted to kick him. His smell nauseated me. How dare he impose his unwashed body on me and everyone else around? There were showers in the hospital. It was unfair to the nurses that he didn’t clean himself, and Nan—I could hold this in no more. “I am here now, Virgil. I plan to sit here all day. I’ve been here every day since the accident. Do you realize that? I have been here every day. I come, stay, go home, take care of Star, help get food for you, and come back. That is what I do. Now I’ll tell you what you must do. You must get up now and take a shower.”
He laced his fingers. His jaw, a structure hidden beneath the great wave of tawny beard that drowned his face and neck, clenched hard, stubbornly, compressing the skin under his eyes. Two could play at that game. I was our mother’s daughter—I clenched my jaw right back at him.
“Virgil—do you hear me?”
He swung his head to me with a bovine torpor. The stench that came of his smallest movements was medieval.
“Right now. I am going to get an orderly to show you where. You are showering, and you are wearing hospital scrubs until I bring you clean clothes tomorrow. If you don’t do this, I am going to ask that you be evicted. Do you even have clean clothes?”
Nan’s clothes always seemed clean enough. I saw clothes drying on the grass outside the Chalet sometimes.
He nodded.
“May I go in the Chalet and get them?”
He looked at me quizzically.
“Your house. The cabin. We call it the Chalet. May I retrieve your clothes?”
He nodded minimally, but enough. At the nurses’ station I made arrangements for his defrocking and ablutions. Two orderlies went to get him, and we passed in the doorway as I reentered to be with Nan. His head was bent, and as he brushed by me, the degree of his exhaustion snapped at my chest. Though I wanted to wring his neck I pitied him and was grateful to him for staying with Nan all the time, though why I should have felt grateful to him, her own father doing his duty, made no sense.
Everything was so mixed up.
After Virgil went to the shower, a nurse skirted Nan’s bed, adjusting lines and checking heartbeat and temperatures.
“She’s better,” I claimed.
She looked up at me and nodded. I kept my expression calm, neutral. I’d learned to manage alarm around medical workers, so they told me more.