A Seahorse in the Thames (4 page)

We step inside and I am greeted with the familiar and the foreign. Half of the furnishings in her nicely arranged living room are from my childhood home, half have no meaning for me. The framed photographs sitting on the glass and wrought iron table by the entrance to her dining room are the most unusual pairings of old and new. The table is new; the photographs are not.

There are four of them; one for each child my mother has borne. Rebecca’s is at the far left, at the beginning of the sentence, if you will. It is one of her high school senior photos, taken the year before her first life ended. Her cocked head, easy smile and cocoa-brown eyes exude tenacity and potential. It must pain my mother to keep that picture up, yet she does. Julian’s photo should be next but it isn’t. Priscilla’s and my senior pictures follow. Being six minutes older, Priscilla precedes me. She is wearing a blue turtleneck, I am wearing yellow. She looks clever and perceptive and I look naïve and hopeful and yet people said they couldn’t tell us apart.

Then there is Julian, last. I’ve never had the courage to ask my mother why he is last and not second in the line of photographs. I long ago convinced myself it doesn’t really matter. I love this picture but I don’t like to look at it. The photo was taken when he was minutes from death. He lived a total of seven hours, twenty-six minutes. Julian fought for survival like all human beings do, regardless of age, but there was no way to win against such a grotesquely malformed heart. My parents refused to speak of it, but my paternal grandmother told me a long time ago that Julian died as peaceful a death as one could wish on an infant doomed to die. He simply drifted away, left the hospital and my mother’s arms like a feather on the wind. Julian doesn’t look like he is dying in the picture; he looks like an adorable, sleeping baby. But I know he was dead seconds after the shutter opened and his likeness was etched on film.

I look away from these pictures as we step into my mother’s kitchen.

I wait for a second to see if she will ask how my appointment went. I didn’t really think she would ask, so when she doesn’t, it is not a surprise. So after our greetings to each other and as she ushers me inside I simply tell her what she wants to hear. That everything is fine.

“The incision is healing fine. Just the way it’s supposed to,” I say, as Margot and Humphrey, run to smell my ankles and beg for attention.

“Good, good,” she says, but in a distracted way. And I honestly don’t mind changing the subject for her benefit. Last Friday was hard for her. Even though I waited until I knew the tumor was benign before I told her I was having surgery, she still didn’t like hearing it. She didn’t like taking me to the hospital for the surgery, didn’t like waiting while I had it, thoroughly didn’t like my violent reaction to the anesthesia after I awoke. She nearly hugged me in relief when I told her in between retching that she should just go home and come back for me in the morning to take me home. So I move on. I ask her if she would like to come with me to see Rebecca this afternoon.

Mom is at her back door, locking it as we prepare to leave the house for lunch.

“I just saw her last Tuesday.”

And that’s that.

We get back in my car and it is on the tip of my tongue to tell her I have met someone. She is usually interested in hearing about new developments in my love life. Well, at least she asks about it now and again. Most of the time there is nothing new to tell. But I decide not to. I am only on Day 5. Besides, my someone is lying in a hospital bed with broken bones and a body full of punctures. She will not want to hear about that.

I ask her about the dogs.

And that’s what we talk about.

It is a little after two when I pull up to Rebecca’s group home. She is waiting for me on the verandah, pacing.

When I get out of my car, she comes running—in her slightly leaning way—to greet me.

“Alexa! Guess what?”

“What?” I match her tone. She likes it when I do.

Her eyes are alight with joy and anticipation. Then she suddenly looks serious. “Wait until we’re inside.”

I follow her into the large lobby of the Falkman Residential Center. It’s a nice place, really, with beautifully landscaped grounds. Thirty people live here, twenty women and ten men. Rebecca shares her room with a twenty-eight-year-old woman with Down’s syndrome named Marietta. She is the friendliest person I know and the perfect roommate. Most of the residents are like Rebecca, they are functioning adults but they need assistance living independent lives. None of them could probably make it on their own. Many of Rebecca’s housemates were born with their disabilities, but several became disabled, like Rebecca did, when they were just out living normal lives. The residents all work in a little building behind the center where they make colorful rugs on giant looms. The rugs are quite beautiful. When the rugs are sold, each resident earns a “paycheck.” It’s a great arrangement. It’s so wonderful that there is a waiting list to get in to the Falkman Center with more than a hundred names on it. The facility is heavily endowed by the Falkman Foundation; so heavily, in fact, that Rebecca’s state disability check plus the four hundred dollars my parents chip in every month pays her room and board. It feels like a real home, because it is. The Center is a private institution; any resident is free to leave at any time.

Rebecca lived at our home in Mount Helix for the first year after her accident. Actually, she lived in the hospital for three months during her recovery and then nine months at home while waiting for an opening at the Falkman Center. With her short term memory problems, finishing college seemed out of the question. And even though Rebecca couldn’t live a completely independent life, she didn’t want to live at home for the rest of her life either. But those nine months she was home, still recuperating, was a very strange time. My parents were still kind of shell-shocked when Rebecca was finally discharged and I can see now that they were hadn’t a clue how to acquaint themselves with Rebecca’s new personality. My parents quarreled often, even before Rebecca’s accident, but it got ten times worse afterward, beginning the moment Dad came home from Tokyo two days later. The more they fought, the more Priscilla retreated into a sort of self-imposed solitary confinement. Before Rebecca came home, there were days when I felt like I was an only child.

While Rebecca was still in the hospital, there was an army of visitors and well-wishers, especially in the beginning. But as the weeks wore on, there were fewer and fewer visitors, such that by the time Rebecca came home, there was really no one for whom my mom had to put on a happy face. The only people that came to visit Rebecca with any kind of regularity were Leanne’s very wealthy father, Gavin McNeil, and his son and Leanne’s older brother, Kevin. I remember thinking back then that they probably felt terribly guilty about what happened because Leanne was the one who had been driving, or that they wanted answers and hoped Rebecca could give them, which she couldn’t. Gavin and Kevin came anyway—one or the other or both—three or four times to the hospital and another three or four times to the house after Rebecca’s discharge. But Rebecca never regained the memory of that night. Leanne’s mother, so I heard, was inconsolable after Leanne’s death. I imagined Gavin and Kevin hoped they could relieve Mrs. McNeil’s agony by giving her an explanation for the car accident that claimed her daughter’s life. But none of us have ever learned the reason why Leanne went off the road that night. After awhile Gavin and Kevin McNeil stopped coming.

Rebecca now tugs on my arm in a conspiratorial way, grinning at me. Her brown hair is pulled back with a red plastic headband, one of two headbands—the other one being a blue one—which she insists on wearing everyday. Her left arm is slightly bent at the elbow and she walks with a tiny hitch in her step, two lasting visual reminders of her long-ago accident. That she walks at all is amazing. When she first emerged from her coma, there was doubt her wounded brain would allow her the use of her legs. But while her head injury made her less oppositional, it didn’t make her less motivated. She worked hard in therapy to learn to walk again. It was while watching her day after day exert herself to exhaustion that I decided to become an occupational therapist. I was the only one of us that cheered her on in the therapy room. My parents and Priscilla had a hard time watching those sessions, watching Rebecca sometimes collapse in frustration. But I didn’t mind being there. There were just as many triumphal moments.

Rebecca and I enter her room and Marietta is there, brushing the hair of a baby doll while she sits on her bed.

“Hi, Marietta,” I say. Marietta smiles at me but doesn’t say anything back, which isn’t unusual for her. Marietta doesn’t say much but she is forever in a good mood. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her grumpy or agitated. I hear drawers being opened and shut behind me. Rebecca is going through her dresser as if looking for something. She turns toward her closet and then back to her dresser, looking flustered. She opens her underwear drawer and rifles through it with a perplexed look on her face.

“What are you looking for?” I ask her.

“I thought I knew where it was,” she says softly, as if to no one.

“Where what was?”

She turns to me and the look on her face is a mix of hesitation and panic, as if she is suddenly wishing she hadn’t admitted she was looking for something. As though maybe her timing had been off, like she had forgotten Marietta and I were in the room with her.

“Rebecca?”

“Do you want to see my fish?” But as soon as she says this, her brows instantly wrinkle, as if this, too, is not a good subject to talk about. Rebecca has had the blue-and-silver betta for six months. I was with her when she bought it, and I can sense she remembers I have seen this fish before, many times.

“Cosmo,” Marietta says and Rebecca whips her head around to look at Marietta, making it seem like she is annoyed Marietta knew the fish’s name.

“I don’t want to talk about my fish,” Rebecca says soberly, speaking to me but looking at Marietta.

“We don’t have to.” I sit down on Rebecca’s bed and purposely look away from her fish.

As Marietta begins to sing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” Rebecca launches into a monologue about what they had for lunch, what she watched on television last night and I can see what this is going to be one of those visits where Rebecca just chatters away about everything and nothing. Whatever she was looking for is forgotten. I don’t mean to but I start to tune her out. I’m thinking about Stephen and I how I feel about him. I’m thinking about my mom and how I wish she was the kind of mom who asked how my doctor’s appointment went. I am thinking of how I miss Priscilla, different though she is, and that even though we email each other frequently, it is not the same as being with her. I’m thinking how every now and then Priscilla hints that she might consider coming home for a visit, but she never follows through. And that she never invites me to come visit her.

Marietta continues to serenade us as I only half-listen to Rebecca’s rambling. I have too much tumbling about in my head and I can see that this visit is pointless. I’m not mentally prepared to visit Rebecca this day. It’s not her fault; it’s mine. When she pauses I tell her I need to get going, that I need to visit a friend in the hospital, which is true.

She seems both annoyed and relieved that I am cutting our visit short. I stand, gingerly hug her goodbye, and try not cry out when she enthusiastically hugs me back.

“See you Sunday, Becca.” She looks back at me, wide-eyed, as though she has forgotten we have a standing date on Sunday afternoons.

I leave her and Marietta to their childlike world and head back out to the lobby. I have my hand on the front door when Frances, the day manager, calls out from behind me.

“I am glad I caught you,” she says, coming up to me. “I wanted to ask you something. I was just wondering if you’ve noticed anything unusual about Rebecca lately?”

Her question startles me. Not that she asked me a question about Rebecca. I mean, with my mother having no phone, I am the main contact person for Rebecca when the Center needs to get a hold of the family. And my visits to Rebecca are regular, unlike my mother’s. It’s just the question itself that startles me.

“No. I don’t think so. She was kind of chatty and distracted today,” I reply. “But that’s not unusual for her.”

Frances thinks for a moment. “It’s probably nothing, she just seems to be a little secretive around me. That’s a new behavior for her. I was just wondering if you had noticed anything… new.”

I shake my head. I just want to go see Stephen.

“No, not really.”

She smiles. “Like I said, it’s probably nothing. Thanks, Alexa. Have a nice rest of the day.”

“Thanks. You, too.”

I slip into my hot car, roll down the windows and head to Sharp Hospital.

I
am nervous as I make my way into the hospital lobby and ask a receptionist for Stephen’s room number. As I inquire it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps Stephen did not have to stay the night or that maybe he was discharged this morning. A broken elbow and ankle aren’t injuries to keep one hospitalized for very long. I really don’t have a plan if they tell me he has gone home.

“He’s in Room 304,” the lady says and she tells me where to find the elevators.

So he’s still here.

I try to calm my nerves as I head to the elevators and press the up arrow.

This is not a big deal. You are just returning his cell phone. You are not in love with him. You have known him less than a week. He is not in love with you.

This is what I tell myself as the elevator trudges up its cables. But I don’t feel any different when the doors pull apart and I step out onto the third floor. I’m still as nervous as a schoolgirl. I follow the signs to his room, smiling at the nurses and orderlies I pass like I am at ease with the state of the entire world.

Stephen’s door is partly open. I knock.

“Come in.”

Stephen’s voice.

I see Ivy first. Her smile is wide and genuine. She is sitting in a chair with a tall back, wearing different clothes, so I assume she drove home last night and came back today. She stands when I walk in.

“Alexa. How wonderful to see you.” And she says it like she really means it.

“Hello, Ivy.” I step farther in. My eyes are drawn to Stephen sitting up in bed. His wounded leg is elevated on a pillow. So is his elbow. His face and neck are streaked and spotted with tiny scrapes and cuts from the hawthorn bushes. But he smiles when he sees me. I cannot tell if he is delighted or amused by my visit, but I can safely file away “bothered” and “annoyed.” He does not appear to be either of these.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi, Stephen.” I step as close as I can to him without touching his bed.

“Must be kind of quiet around your place today. Or did my friend show up?”

“Friend?”

“I called a colleague of mine and asked him to finish up the job for me. He didn’t come?”

“Oh. I’ve been gone most of the day, actually. He could be there now, I suppose.”

“You’ve been out? You must be feeling pretty good. That’s great.”

I don’t know how we so easily got onto the topic of how I am faring, but I want to ask him how he is.

“You didn’t go to work today, did you?” he continues.

“Uh, no. No, I had a check-up and then lunch with my mom and then I stopped to see Rebecca.”

“Rebecca’s her sister,” he says to his mom. “The one who was in the car accident.”

I am bewildered, I must admit. He has told his mother about Rebecca. Which means he must have talked to her about me. What else did he tell her?

“Oh, of course,” Ivy says. “Well, I am sure she must have liked that. Alexa, would you like to sit down?”

I turn to Ivy to tell her I am fine with standing and I notice that she looks a little tired. No, not tired. Sad, maybe?

“It’s okay. I don’t mind standing. I won’t stay long.” She takes the chair instead of me.

I turn my head back to Stephen and he seems to be searching my face for a reason for my visit. I plunge my hand into my purse and close it around his cell phone and wallet.

“I forgot to give these back to you yesterday,” I place them atop the wheeled tray next to him where a water bottle sits and the remote for the television.

“Oh. Thanks,” he says and I am certain there is disappointment in his voice. Is it my imagination or is he disappointed that returning his cell phone and wallet is the only apparent reason I came?

I don’t like the look of disappointment on his face.

I take the plunge.

“So, are you okay? Are you in much pain?”

His features soften.

“The bones will mend. And the pain is nothing that a little orange juice and codeine can’t fix.”

I smile at this, at his attempt to make light of his injuries. “So you’ll be going home soon?”

He doesn’t stop smiling, but he looks over to Ivy and I follow his gaze. She smiles, too. But it is a weary smile.

“In couple days, maybe.” He turns his head back to me.

A tremor of foreboding slices through me. “Couple of days?”

Stephen clears his throat. “The doctors want to check something out, that’s all.”

“Check what out?”

He doesn’t answer right away and the moments of silence give me plenty of time to realize I have no business asking such a question.

“I’m sorry… I had no right to ask that,” I practically trip over my words.

“No, it’s okay—”

“No, it’s not.”

“Alexa, don’t beat yourself about it. I don’t mind telling you if you really want to know.”

I hear Ivy shift her weight in her chair.

“Is something else wrong?” I ask, and now I hear the apprehension in my voice.

Stephen holds my gaze and it feels like he is holding me with his arms. He is being the strong one.

“When I was thirteen I had a brain tumor that was cancerous,” he says easily, as if he were telling me when he was thirteen he had a dog named Rex. “I had surgery and radiation and we licked it. But the doctors are concerned about the headaches I have been having and why I blacked out when I was standing on your roof. They just want to make sure the tumor hasn’t returned. So I’m going to stay a couple days, get an MRI and then we’ll know.”

He says all of this like he’s not a part of it, like he’s a spectator or a journalist or even one of the doctors.

I look over at Ivy and she is smiling that same weary smile but her eyes have grown misty. She is looking at Stephen, her only child, and not at me, but the look of a hurting mother is something I cannot bear. I feel my own eyes glaze over with moisture and I look away from her. When I raise my eyes to meet Stephen’s, I see that he is deeply moved by my response.

“It could be nothing,” he says, and I am sure he is speaking to both Ivy and me but he is looking at me. And I sense in his eyes that he already knows it is
something
. He has been down this road before. And so has Ivy.

“Sounds kind of scary,” I manage to say.

He leans back a little on his pillow, like he is comfortable with being honest with me. “Yeah. It kind of is.”

I cannot think of an adequate response to such an amazing view of life, so I just nod and wait for the dampness in my eyes to retreat.

“So, so when will you have the MRI?” My voice sounds shaky in my ears.

“Tomorrow morning.”

Tomorrow. I already know how life can change in the span of twenty-four hours. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve felt it happen. And now I feel weighted by the prospect of
tomorrow
, and at how everything that defines you can change within its confines. Added to this weight is a crazy notion I feel welling up within me that Stephen’s dilemma is pulling me closer toward him, or maybe it’s his view of his dilemma that pulls me. In any case, I feel like I’m about to cross a line with him. One of those inevitable points of no return. The line of personal involvement. He probably doesn’t even know I stand at this line. That I am standing at a place where I will choose.

“Would you mind if I came by tomorrow afternoon, afterward?” I say, slightly amazed at how easily this question falls off my lips. It is clear to me the outcome matters to me.

“No,” he says and I stiffen for a second. But he continues. “No, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

I am wrong.

He knows.

When I arrive back to the triplex, a quartet of men is finishing up the triplex roof. One of them is descending the ladder as I pull into my driveway. I get out of my car and stare up at the finished project.

“There’s no rain in the forecast, but if there was, you’d be all set,” the man on the ladder says as he jumps off at the third rung.

“Wow. That was fast,” I reply. “Stephen said he’d called someone. I figured that meant just one person.”

The man gestures with his hands to the other workers. “Well, I knew these guys would have just frittered away the afternoon watching soap operas, so, you know…”

One of the other men on the roof throws an old shingle down, intending to hit the man from the ladder but he ducks. All four men laugh. I can see these guys being friends with Stephen. I can see him being the man on the ladder. I can see him being the man who jokingly threw the shingle. And I can see him abruptly changing his Friday afternoon plans to help a friend.

I walk into my house and decide to get a pitcher of iced tea ready to offer Stephen’s friends. But the men outside are pulling away in a red truck when I get to the front door ten minutes later. One of them is driving Stephen’s vehicle, which had been left at the curb last night. I wave to them. And they honk a farewell.

I take the tea and glasses back to the kitchen, feeling perplexed. I open the fridge and look at my options for dinner. Nothing looks appetizing and yet I am hungry. I grab an apple and take it outside. I haven’t been able to run on the beach since my surgery; one of my favorite pastimes, but I feel well enough to walk on the wet sand. And I feel the need to.

The shoreline of Mission Beach is only three blocks away so within minutes I am standing at the threshold of the blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. I stand at the water’s edge, eating my apple and watching the after-work surfers head into the waves. I immediately think of Stephen. This is something he told me he loves to do. I picture him as one of the figures far out in the waves, glistening in black as his wet suit catches the sun’s rays. I have never attempted to surf. I am too afraid of the bigger waves’ power. But I can imagine I see Stephen bending at the knees, arms held out like the wings on an airplane, riding on the fury of water as if to tame it.

And yet I know some things cannot be tamed. I could see in Stephen’s eyes that he already suspects what the MRI will reveal. Perhaps he had already started to suspect something was wrong. Perhaps he was figuring it out two days ago when he realized he had consumed all the Tylenol that he keeps in his trunk. Perhaps today it all made sense to him when he fully realized nothing hit him in the head as he stood on the ridgeline of my roof.

The surfer I have been watching has taken the wave to where it ends. He is standing in knee-deep water and bending over his board. He grabs it and runs back into the froth. Jumping over the little waves that want to break upon him, he heads out to where the true swells gather momentum.

I have never had the courage to try surfing.

I wonder if somewhere within me that courage nevertheless lives, untapped.

Saturday morning arrives warm and without the usual thick, coastal cloud cover. I rise and step into the kitchen to make coffee. I notice that my incision feels itchy today, not sore, and I don’t falter as I go outside to retrieve the paper.

I walk back inside and toss the paper on the living room table, restless. It is tomorrow. Stephen will have the MRI this morning. Maybe he is having it now. Maybe the radiologist is at this very moment looking at the tissues in Stephen’s brain. Maybe at this very moment he sees something that isn’t supposed to be there…

I will myself to stop letting my imagination run wild. I go back into the kitchen, yank a mug out of my dishwasher with my good arm and fill it with coffee. I go back to my bedroom, intending to switch on my computer to see if Priscilla has emailed me, as is her custom on Saturdays, but my cell phone rings.

“Alexa, it’s Pauline.” Pauline is the new weekend manager at the Falkman Residential Center. She sounds agitated.

“Hello, Pauline.”

“Alexa, is Rebecca with you? Did you take her out last night? Did you forget to sign her out?”

A cold, river of fear washes over me. “No!” I answer.

“Does your mother have her?”

Oh dear God. “No! Mom doesn’t have her!”

“She’s gone, Alexa!”

“What do you mean, she’s gone?” I yell.

“I mean she’s not here. Her little overnight suitcase is gone. She left a note for someone to feed her fish. She’s not here. If you don’t have her, I don’t know where she is!”

My mind is instantly swirling to come up with explanations of where Rebecca could be. I can think of nothing. She has never done anything like this before. Never.