Alone at night in the stark room where he sleeps, Bit dreams of the city. It is depopulated, shining with wet. The streets are long and gray, and the shop windows are so glorious they fill him with wonder: the mannequins are luminous, at the near cusp of human, their clothes made of cut paper, a pane of glass away from dissolving in the rain. As he walks, he hears noises behind him drawing nearer: the click of nails, indrawn breath, the slide of something heavy against a wall. But when he turns, there is always the street stretching behind him into the dark and nothing moves, and he is alone and not alone, and frozen in horror.
Grete goes to school. Already thin, she grows skinny. For a week, he presses his ear to her door as she sobs into a pillow. She is always on Hannah’s telephone, her cell not working in these wilds. Her friends must grow tired of her sadness, though, and Grete begins leaving more messages than talking. When they ignore her for days at a time, he wishes he could march them all off a gangplank. Pirate Bit with the baby face; just wound his daughter and see how savage he can be.
The doctor calls, and her smooth voice calms Bit for hours afterward.
Cheryl and Diana visit; the ladies Hannah volunteered with at the library visit; Hannah’s many friends from town visit. Jincy and the boys come up for an afternoon. They play in Titus’s treehouse, and when they come out their faces are swollen and red. At dinner, the twins cling to Hannah, kissing her cheeks over and over until Jincy calls them off. Let the woman eat, she says, and they all watch breathlessly as Hannah maneuvers a cherry tomato to the side of her mouth, slides it along her lips, finally gets it in.
Goal, she says, to make the boys laugh.
When Jincy says goodbye, she whispers, This’ll be the last time for a while. My friend at the
Times
says it’ll be a matter of days before we’re all on quarantine. She kisses him on the nose and says, I’m not surprised you found the safest place to be when the shit hits the fan.
Stay here, he says. Be safe. But she shakes her head sadly. Our life is elsewhere.
In the afternoon, when Bit and his daughter are in town at the pharmacy, Grete begs for a twenty and buys something that she hides in her backpack. When she comes out to dinner, her hair has changed to an inky black, blue swoops of dye still on the pale skin of her forehead. She stares at Hannah and Bit, daring them to say something.
Hannah puts down her forkful of pasta. Black, she says thoughtfully. It sets off your beautiful green-gold eyes, Grete. Grete scowls, pleased. Hannah negotiates the fork almost into her mouth, missing, and all three watch the linguine slowly unthread itself from the tines and slide back onto the plate. Meals these days have become thrillers. Here, Grannah, Grete says and twists her fork into the slippery noodles, and Bit watches, fighting to stay in his seat, as his daughter feeds his mother bite by careful bite.
Grete gazes out the window with the smell of bad Chinese takeout tendriling toward them from the backseat and says, In gym today we had to run a mile. And I beat everyone, even the boys. She says it indifferently but doesn’t exhale, waiting for him to speak.
I was fast when I was your age, too, he says.
She gazes at her fingernails, says, It’s dumb, but the coach wants me to run Varsity.
Bit says, How exciting.
She turns to him. But Dad, it means that you’re the only one all day long with Grannah. It’s too much, two extra hours every day. You look
awful
already.
Thanks, he says. Punk.
I mean it, she says. I think I have to say no.
You’ll have to say yes. It would make me happy to watch you run, Bit says. It would make Hannah happy to see you use those healthy young legs of yours. He imagines his mother stuck in her renegade body, watching Grete whipping around a track. It could be painful, the juxtaposition between her imprisonment and Grete’s freedom. But he says, She’ll live through you, and hopes it is true when Grete turns away to hide her smile against the window, her tattletale arms pricked with goosebumps.
Bit is woken by a rasp. It is Luisa’s night off, and at first he thinks it’s the wind against the screen. He sits, heart thrumming in his ears. The sound is coming from the room next door. He hurries over the rough planks into Hannah’s room. Even in the shadows, he can see she’s rigid with terror; when he turns on the light, her face is bluish. He pulls her to sitting, and supports her body as she gasps deeper, calming, quieting. He puts pillows behind her back and props her against the headboard.
Oh, Bit, she says. Can’t sit up. No air.
Scary, he says.
Stupid, she spits. Her fear has disintegrated into fury, he sees. She says, Wasted your potential, Bit. All your life tried to make people whole. What you could have done. If you didn’t have to
nurse
everyone. Helle, Grete, me. Students. You could have been an
artist
.
He says, very quietly, I am an artist.
She flicks her good hand at him but says no more. When her eyelids grow heavy and her head nods forward, he goes to the kitchen and finds the number that the lovely doctor at the hospital had scrawled on a napkin and pressed into his hand. He feels sick to call her so late; his heart beats in his throat. But she answers on the first ring. She is calm and clear, and there is only the smallest touch of sleep in her voice. He imagines her bedroom, spare and neat, imagines the straps of a chemise slipping from her shoulders. I’m so glad you called, she says warmly and makes sympathetic noises as he talks.
He looks at Hannah sleeping in the light of her bedside lamp. He feels how, out in the night, his sadness is prowling, watching the one lit window in the Green house, biding its time.
It’s like she’s slowly turning into a lump of clay, he says. A piece of rock.
Well, the doctor says and hesitates. He can hear a whine in the background, and Bit feels ashamed, thinking it’s a newborn—what a pervert he is! of course, she has a family!—but she says, Down, Otto, and he smiles to know it’s a dog. She says, Your mother’s not yet made out of stone. Not yet.
He is too tired to sleep, and sits under an old comforter on a rocking chair on the porch, watching the dawn slip in. He can’t remember the last time he quietly watched this drama unfold; what could possibly seem so important that it kept him from doing this? When did he become a person who stopped
noticing
? First the moon dims, and in the east there’s a slit in the belly of the sky. A trickle of light pours over the hills, over the Amish farms, over the country roads, over the limit of Arcadia, the miles and miles of forest, startling the songbirds and lighting the dew from within. He thinks of Linnaeus’s flower clock blooming the hours, chicory to dandelion to water lily to pimpernel, a gentler way to live time. In a breath, the day is full upon him. Hannah is calling him weakly from her bed, and in her voice he can hear the apology he wasn’t expecting he’d so badly need.
The doctor’s car is mud-spattered when she pulls up. Through the windshield, they grin at one another, and neither stops smiling when she gets out. They hug: her thinness beneath his arms, her cold hands. His mother is in a slice of sun on the porch. Hannah’s eyes flick, amused, from Bit’s face to the doctor’s and back, when the doctor does her exam.
But the more questions Hannah answers, the more serious the doctor looks, until she makes Hannah breathe into a machine. A spirometer, she explains. To measure forced vital capacity. When Hannah does the test again lying down, the doctor’s face turns grim. Without her permanent smile, she seems older than he thought: early thirties, not late twenties. Ms. Stone, she says, severely. Are you still against treatment? Riluzole, stem-cell therapies?
Ameliorative, yes, Hannah says. Palliative, she says, and pauses. Then she says, Hell, bring on the morphine.
The doctor relaxes. Good, she says. Martyrdom is overrated.
Hannah laughs aloud, the first clear Hannah laugh Bit has heard for so long. For some, she says. For my son, it’s as natural as breathing.
This time, the critique is infused with warmth. In Bit, though, a flash of bitterness like a bird winging away. Unfair, he says. She winks, and he can almost hear her say
Not untrue.
Speaking of breathing, the doctor says and clips off to her car. She is so small and tidy; he thinks of a lithe brown cat. He avoids Hannah’s knowing grin. The doctor returns, bearing a pamphlet. I’m going to have you fitted for a BiPAP, she says to Hannah, so you can breathe better while you sleep. You almost scared your son to death last night.
She is finished with the exam but seems loath to go and Hannah asks about the pandemic. The doctor shrugs. SARI, she says. What a name. Makes you wonder who’s in charge. She sits on the steps and talks about quarantine, online tracking of the disease, precautions. I wear a mask in the hospital now, she admits. Everyone does. Mostly, it seems to be killing the immune-compromised, newborns and the old and the sick. Some healthy adults. But the onset is sudden, within an hour or two. I came here straight from my house without seeing anyone on the way. When she smiles, small parentheses go white around her mouth. She touches Hannah’s hand. If I ever suspect I could be carrying it, of course I won’t come out. I wouldn’t risk your health.
If you have it, Hannah jokes, come straight here. Save us all some time.
Bit studies the pamphlet in his hands. Death by pandemic and death by ALS: severe pneumonia in both cases, Hannah drowning in the sea of her own lungs. But between slowly being mired in her body and a half-day drowning, she may be right. Quicker might be better.
He hears a clip-clop down the drive and looks up. An Amish buggy among the maples. Hannah peers, shields her eyes with her hand. What a day, she says.
The buggy comes to a halt, and the saucer-faced woman from Abe’s memorial service climbs down from her bench and ties the horse to a tree. Glory, Hannah calls out, and at first, Bit thinks it’s an expostulation, but the woman gives a wave. She comes up the porch steps, a pie wrapped in a dishtowel still steaming in her hands. She places the pie gently on Hannah’s lap. Her eyes are sad, though, and skitter off Hannah’s face.
Hannah reaches with her good hand and grasps the woman’s wrist. She says, gazing up at her Amish friend, You young people, take a walk up to Arcadia House until lunch. It seems I need to do a little work at redemption here.
Indeed, the little Amish woman says in a low and guttural voice. You do.
The sun is hot on Bit’s shoulders. The doctor’s fine, tiny sandals are caked with mud, and Bit wants to take them in his hands and beat them clean on the grass. There is dirt worked into the cleavage between her toes. His own are irritated in sympathy, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Bit and the doctor walk up the ancient slate steps. They don’t talk until they are standing on the porch, gazing at the gnarled apples on the Terraces below. Leif had planted saplings on the lowest level, replacing the trees so antique they no longer fruited, but the young trees were chewed to nubs by starved deer, and now the Terraces are scribbled with brush.
The doctor tucks a wisp of hair behind her ear, her hands shaking a little, and a warmth starts in Bit’s stomach and spreads. This place, she says. My uncle said that for a while after the commune broke up, high school kids came up here to fool around. There was this story about these two kids who looked up in the middle of getting it on to find a scary huge hippie with an ax glowering at them.
That would be Titus, Bit says, stinging at the thought of his old friend.
Then, of course, the film company came, the doctor says. We used to take field trips out in elementary school. All the other kids on the planet wanted to be rap stars and marine biologists, but we wanted to be animators. Everyone had a crush on that blond CEO. I used to dream I was married to him and rode around on horses out here all day long.
That was Leif, Bit says. His sister was my wife.
Oh. Her eyes scan his face, and he can see her decide not to ask about the
was,
or about the
wife
. She says, It was pretty traumatic for Summerton when the company left the area. We were just getting a downtown back, then it died again like every other town around here. I had a clinic for a little while, but it closed and I had to move to Rochester.
It was in Leif’s will for the company to stay here, Bit said. But you know stockholders.
What ever happened to him? she says. Nobody in town really knew. You should have heard the stories. He was eaten by a bear, he was extradited by Homeland Security. It was nuts.
The truth is weirder. He was lost in a high-altitude balloon, Bit says. That family has a genius for disappearing. He looks at her profile, the teeth caught on her lower lip, the crow’s-feet as she squints out toward the hills. My wife disappeared, too, he says. Eleven years ago. She went for a walk and never came back.
I’m sorry, she says. He notices a short yellow hair curled on her breast and stops his hand from reaching for it. She flushes, then picks it off. My dog, she says. I thought he’d be good protection for a woman living alone, but he’s scared of everything. Lightning, strangers, ice, the dark.
I’ve never had a pet, Bit says. We were never allowed to have dogs here when I was a kid. We considered it animal slavery.
Otto thinks I’m the slave, she says. I pick up
his
poop, after all.
They watch a little red fox come out at the edge of the forest, crouch, pounce, and carry off something gray in his mouth. The doctor’s small hand touches his arm.
Bit, she begins, too solemnly, and something seizes in Bit: she is going to say it, the things he knows deeply but can’t stand to hear: his mother is going rapidly; she’ll be in a wheelchair within a month; it is only her stubbornness that has kept her from one so far; instead of going with the slowness he’s been fearing, she’ll go with dreadful speed. If he hears the words, he thinks, it will come true. He has to fight himself to answer. What’s that, Dr. Ellis? he says, at last.
Ellis is my first name, she says and tries and fails to not laugh. Ellis Keefe. I didn’t want to correct you in the hospital. All I was going to say is that I can see why you love this place; and she gestures toward the forest that spreads all the way to the hills in the distance. In the motion, Bit sees what Arcadia had been, populous and full of song. Now it feels empty. Without people, land is only land.