Grete has filled six of Hannah’s skin-thin teacups with water and daisies. They shine in the dawn. These days, they use the antique lace tablecloth and the silver service at every meal. It comforts Hannah to handle things her own mother and grandmother touched.
While Luisa changes the bedsheets, Bit and Hannah are alone.
Hannah peers urgently at the computer. When the voice comes on, it says with gentle calm, My little Bit. Will you forgive me?
Bit’s silence, born of surprise, stretches. Forgive what, exactly? Which of her many failures is she speaking of?
He stares at the claw of her hand until he somehow knows she means Arcadia, their common wound, how she had pushed toward perfection but, tiring, turned away. It is true that most of the children of Arcadia rebelled. Dylan went neocon, Cole became punk, Jincy searched for suburbia, Leif turned antiseptic and inward. It’s the ancient story: the deliberate rejection of what gave birth to the youth and created the man. In the quiet of the house, Luisa’s shoes squeak around the bed, the mockingbird begins a rill.
Bit feels it start to swell in him. The love, which he had turned from, breathes, blinks, swallows. A creature, stirred back to life. He
can’t
be separate. It is impossible. He is part of the whole.
He looks at his brittle mother and says, There is nothing to forgive.
Within the rebellious clay of her flesh, Hannah kindles, becomes so unbearably brilliant that it hurts Bit to look at her. Still, he keeps his eyes on her. He looks.
Hannah had once been vaster than Arcadia itself, her body so big it enveloped him, the warmth of her, the bread of her, so great that the sun had risen and set in her. Dwindling, she is a burlap sack and bundle of sticks; she is frayed muscles, weeping sores.
He carries her into the Pond. She dabbles her hands and legs, pretending to swim. They hear Grete’s fast footsteps as she runs up. She wades in, still in her clothes, the jeans and boat shoes, the pretty top. She goes underwater and comes up next to them, her hair plastered and eyeliner streaming in black slips down her cheeks. She says, Let me, and carries Hannah away through the water toward Helle’s rock. When she turns around, she is singing the song that Bit used to sing to her, the summers they spent up in Arcadia, when she was little and frightened of the thick water of the Pond . . .
swimming all day, In the ocean so wide, Now it’s time to rest, And float with the tide, Hey ho, little fish don’t cry
, she sings.
Luisa is calm but pushes through the countryside at such speeds that Bit is afraid of the trees rushing by in the darkness. Bit holds his choking mother. They are in the ER. In a moment, the doctor in his green scrubs brandishes a scalpel and Hannah has a hole in her throat. Cotton descends upon Bit’s mind. For a long, good time, there is blankness.
They wheel Hannah out again. There is a ventilator attached to her. She is weeping. I didn’t want this, she will say at home, clawing at the tubes; but it’s clear, even now, what she means. Luisa says something:
refused to talk about advance directives. Hannah.
Bit finds himself in the car, going home.
He can administer enemas, hold his mother one-armed over the toilet, wipe her bottom. He can brush the shine into her long whitening hair and file her toenails and rub the muscles that cramp until she gasps with relief. He can spend all his patience from dawn to dusk spooning soup into her mouth which she chokes on more often than not. Even in the hospital, when they asked her about a feeding tube, she had been so agitated they understood her No. He can watch her waste away. To make peace with the problems of her flesh is not hard for him. But something deep in him resists the raw wound in her throat, the way it smells of death.
He watches his hand clean it, anyway. He has locked himself away so that his days are lived by a shred of himself. The rest of him waits somewhere on the outskirts, watching for the end.
But Hannah studies the part of Bit that remains. She is expanding while he is retracting. She is a cup. She overbrims with love.
Hannah cannot swallow her food. She chokes and lets it dribble from her mouth. Bit remembers a story, somewhere, of a woman bricked into a wall. This is his mother, interred alive.
Ellis kneels at Hannah’s side. She isn’t sleeping, either: she is pale, her face drawn in the sun. Bit hears among the murmurs,
starvation . . . feeding tube.
No, the computer voice says cheerily. I am glad to have had these months. It was right. But I am almost done. Let me starve.
Ellis lays her brown cheek on Hannah’s hand. You’re right. It’s a gentler way to go, Hannah, she murmurs. We’ll give you opioids and keep you comfortable. As long as you’re still happy with this decision.
Hannah’s eyes dart at Bit. The computer sings out, I am happy, now, to go.
The women tighten, a knot, around Bit’s small family. Luisa and Grete, always; Glory every afternoon. This morning, thumbing their noses at the quarantine, Cheryl and Diana, the Library Ladies. Grete is gone for hours on her runs. When Ellis arrived the night before, she held her soft cheek on his, and he could feel the pulse of her, the promise. Such terrible timing, to find what he had been hoping for, now. She had put her things in his closet, and slipped into his sheets, her body cool as a salve. When he rose to get a glass of water, he’d heard Grete in her room whispering into Otto’s patient ruff.
Before lunch, Astrid, alerted by Grete, sweeps in. Bit doesn’t see her at first, but he feels the house fill with her cold blue flame. Then she is cupping his cheeks in her callused hands. She kisses him on the forehead, and he wears the kiss for the rest of the day like a badge.
Cooking, tending, cleaning: omnipresent like flies, the hands of women.
When it is overmuch, he goes to the Pond and submerges himself in the too-warm water. The weeds grab and slide against him. A hawk watches him from a branch, a blue jay in its talons. When Bit proves innocuous, the hawk bends its head to the bird and down confettis onto the surface of the water. Small blue feathers stick to Bit’s skin when he climbs out.
On his walk back, he sees a man sitting on Scott and Lisa’s porch. Even from a distance, Bit can see the man is Amish: full-clothed in the heat, suspenders black against a white shirt. Bit approaches warily. The man stands and nods, and his beard wags. He’s fair-haired with rosy cheeks and shoulders so square they could be hewn from oak. Bit had seen him on Glory’s arm at Abe’s service; her husband. When Bit nears, the man’s eyes begin to twinkle. He makes a little pinching motion with his fingers and brings it to his lips. If Bit didn’t know better, he would say that it was the universal sign of a toke.
I’m sorry? he says.
Amos, the man says, pointing at his chest. He makes the sign again, then a motion that could only mean waterfall. And it returns to Bit like a slap, the day at the end of Arcadia, Ike and Cole and he in the waterfall, the two Amish boys stepping out of the twilit woods, the crouching around the campfire, the joint. This must be one of those boys.
Bit gapes in astonishment. The man looks around and winks. Then he makes the toke sign again. One minute, Bit says. He walks through the back door and rummages in Abe’s office until he finds the tennis ball he knows would be there.
When he comes out again, the man is looking squirrelly, but he beams when Bit presses on the side of the ball and the invisible cut in it mouths open and a little bag of weed falls out. Bit rolls one, and they smoke. It feels so good to stand with another man in compassionate silence. Amos goes heavy-lidded and says, Glory. They walk back together toward the Green house. When Glory comes out, tucking her loose hair under her bonnet, Bit and Amos are petting the horse, chuckling at nothing.
She sniffs and frowns at Bit with her bunched-berry features. She says, What have you done with my husband?
Bit only says, thoughtfully, I would like to eat the world; and his new friend Amos chuckles alongside him.
In the dusk, Grete arrives home, scratched and sunburnt, her arms speckled with bites. The house is packed. Ellis is giving Hannah a manicure; she grins up at Bit, and he blows her a kiss from the door. Grete leans toward Bit and mutters, Why are there old ladies all over the place?
He puts another biscuit in his mouth to keep from answering.
Hannah hears Grete, though, and the computer voice rises sweetly, saying: It’s an infestation.
Wasting Hannah, faster and faster. Her belly, distended. Her face shrinking to settle among its bones, her flesh mottled. Bit tries to not shudder upon seeing her. Grete can’t be in the room without closing her eyes to her grandmother.
So strange, however: with her body leaving, her soul is rising to the surface. There is fire there, he sees. An ecstasy. He hurts with recognition: where has he seen this before? The answer comes to him in the night. In his knowledge-drunk youth in the college library, the lonely section of art books, the giving spread of them, the lustful dizzied colors. The faces of the saints. Girls: Catherine of Siena, Saint Veronica, Columba of Rieti.
Anorexia mirabilis,
the body emptying of corporeal want and filling with the wine of God.
Bit buries his face among his father’s sweaters, yearning for Abe to emerge, to make it all better, to take over.
He comes out of the closet. Luisa moves about in the kitchen. Hannah’s room is black and he and Hannah are there alone. Through the thick air, the smooth voice says softly, Don’t be afraid, Bit. I’m not afraid.
He fills an entire roll watching the afternoon light slant across his mother’s wasted face, watching her hands curled like snails on the dough of her belly.
He will develop these later in the pitch-black silence of a color darkroom; in the light, he will hold his mother in his hands again, fractured and grainy, her ruined body perfected by the ruined film.
Astrid sits behind Hannah, smoothing her hair. They used to be sisterly; now, the gulf is vast. Astrid flesh, Hannah bone. They remove the ventilator. Hannah’s eyelids are the purple of a bruise. She doesn’t wake. Her body is clenching back to its original form. She is a wisp, she would be gone in a slight wind.
Insomniac, he comes into the living room and finds Ellis in the recliner. She wakes to him watching her. She begins to say something, but he puts his hand over her mouth and holds it there, feeling the warm movement of her lips, her big teeth, her breath. She stands, and makes him dizzy with her perfume. He leads her out, into the night, over the ground that cracks with branches. The door of Midge’s house, dug into the hillside, opens under his palm. A fury fills him, and he leads her into the farthest bedroom, the windowless one, the pure blankness of earth there. He presses her against the cold concrete wall; she gasps; he pulls her skirt roughly over her hips and finds the welcome of her. They slip to a low bed. The darkness in him comes alive, angry. When he is done, he lifts himself so he is light on her bones and her shallow breath can deepen. He feels the clammy sheets on his legs, her mouth sliding gently on his wet cheeks, the fist clenched in his chest loosening.
Despite the shame, it is good, this thing; in a world gone to shit, this between people should be preserved.
I’m sorry, he says.
Don’t, she says. I’m not.
I’m an ass, he says. Her hands on his neck, shoulders, back. His ear is against the concrete. Ellis says, kindly, It’s all right.
He says nothing, and she says at last, Listen. I love Hannah. But you know I’m not here right now because of her. Her eyelashes are damp on his cheekbone. It had to happen sometime.
He groans. I’ll make it up to you, he says. His lips on the delicate, bitter folds of her ear. Her smile tightening along his jawbone. You will, she murmurs, her voice somewhere inside his skull.
It is the quiet hour. He can hear the tinkle of a wind chime forgotten up at Arcadia House.
Astrid looks at the clock. Luisa will be here soon, she says.
Bit holds his mother’s frond of a hand.
Astrid moves to the table where the morphine sits. I’m giving her a large dose, she says. Enough to knock her out. She bends over Hannah, a willow.
She finishes and puts a palm on Bit’s cheek. I’m not going to write this down, she says. The silence swells between them. You have to say you understand, she says.
I understand, he says. The words come from far away, years ago, the sun.
Astrid leaves. Luisa comes in. She flips through the log in the light of the pallid moon. Hm. Unlike Astrid to forget morphine, she says, but she is careful not to look at Bit.
He says nothing. He watches Luisa prepare the drug, find the catheter. He watches the slow slide in.
It doesn’t take long. Asleep, Hannah folds further into herself.
There is a lightening, as if a weight has been removed from her chest.
And his mother is gone.
It is hot and windless and bright; the last flare of sunset, Hannah’s time of day.
Many said their goodbyes to Hannah at Abe’s services. This gathering is smaller. The stalwarts are here, the women. The Amish are here, mixed in. Ellis holds Bit’s hand. Grete is pale and composed in the green dress Hannah had made her promise to wear. It brings out your eyes, Hannah had said. It makes Grete look like Hannah.
Astrid stands in the Pond, and the water draws slow dark swoops up the fabric of her white dress. She bends to a leaf, where she places a lit candle and pushes it off. The candle moves toward the center of the Pond in a length of ripples, then stops. Astrid sings, her voice cracked.
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see; O thou who changes not, abide with me.
There is no wind. Grete wades out alone, tipping the basket. When Hannah’s remains go into the Pond, they fall straight down. When the heavy pieces of her break the surface, the water heals itself. The rest of the ashes are lighter and float; they bloom in a slow flush across the surface.
Back inside the empty house, the black dog arrives. Bit opens his arms to it, tooth and claw. Outside, there are voices, people drinking juice and eating cake in the Sugarbush.