Search Party (25 page)

“Neither do I,” Teresa said.

“M
ARY
A
NN
, he yanked you by the arm, hard. I saw him. And then the time you were dancing at the sink. He spun you around. You snapped your fingers. You thought he was doing some flamenco thing. You thought he was going to dance with you.”

“I did,” said Mary Ann, not making it a question.

“He pushed you. He was furious. I know this.
You told me
. He said, ‘People can see in.'”

“They could, too,” Mary Ann said. The big windows of the apartment where she had lived eight months before came back to her clearly, with plants on the sills. Were these plants she had now the same ones?

“You talked about getting a cat.” Teresa seemed to have a drill, a list she worked from, of things that were normal and things that were not normal. Mary Ann saw that the list was scrambled but could not be sure where Teresa came down on some of the items. “He kept going to see his family in Canada. You liked the same music. Music was a big thing to him. You knew him three months. He said he was studying for the GREs. You didn't say you had lived with guys before. He is, I admit, an incredibly good-looking guy. You told your mom, ‘He's the best-looking man I ever saw.' You told your mom everything.”

“I did.”

In his backpack he had kept a pill container, and when she clicked open the compartments for the days, they were all empty. She didn't know which of Teresa's lists this would go on. Sometimes a thing that seemed in his favor, such as the fact that he had cried and played “Come As You Are” all day the day they heard Kurt Cobain was dead, was on the wrong list.

Teresa picked her up from PT so often she was getting to know Nolan. “That Nolan,” Teresa said. “He used to be a wild child, know that?”

“What do you mean?”

“He went here as an undergrad and then he trained here. Said he used to live down at the Blue Moon.”

Mary Ann didn't ask what the Blue Moon was.

“He was a drummer of all things! He drummed with some band.”

How did Teresa know that?

“What a little sweetie,” Teresa said.

S
MELLS
. Detergent, for instance. That smell contained the time she said, “Jesus you waste a lot of electricity.” Dennis worked out every day in the fitness room in their building, and after he showered he put in a wash. He didn't mix his laundry with hers but went down to the basement machines by himself and came back with a small, folded pile. When she said that, he stood there with his back to her, holding the laundry against his chest. She put her arms around him from the back and she could feel the heartbeat shaking his body. Gradually it slowed down.

“How come you don't criticize me? How come you don't get mad?” she said. “Like when I swear. I know it bothers you.”

“You know it but you do it,” he said without turning around. “Is that the idea?”

A
FTER
a year her mother was the only one who talked about it. Only her mother craved an exact tally of what had been altered or erased, and searched for it in photograph albums, in Mary Ann's old transcripts and letters of acceptance.

He had pleaded guilty. Something was wrong with him so he was in a private institution. Where? It didn't matter where. Wherever it was, he could not get out. Her mother assured her of this until her father said, “Gail, that's not something Mary's worried about.”

She didn't worry. Even later, when her mother was in bed dying, Mary Ann was not worrying. Her worry centers were gone, Nolan said. He wished his were.

“You need snowflakes,” she told him.

F
OR
a while her friends would remind her of things, explain things, question and prompt her. Reason with her. They liked to tell her stories of herself, how she had drunk beer half the night and aced the anatomy exam, how when they got their grades she had climbed onto the iceberg and danced.

After a while she saw less of them because more than a year had gone by and they were in their clinical rotations. “It breaks my heart,” her mother said. “Where are they? Where's Teresa?”

“She's at her apartment,” Mary Ann replied. She was the logical one now.

“The only person you see anything of is Nolan.”

“I see the doctor. The OT. I see those people downstairs. I see you and Dad.”

“I wonder if Nolan knows who you really are,” her mother said in her new voice of thin argument.

Mary Ann didn't argue any more, with her mother or anyone else, the energy for it having left her. It was to Nolan, now, that she told everything.

“She means who
she
thinks you are,” Nolan said. “She can't help it.” Nolan understood everybody. He had to. Once the doctors were finished, he took over. In serious rehab, with the Hoyer lifts and the parallel bars, you saw it all. “We get the guy who makes the winning touchdown at three o'clock, and at six he gets hit by a bus. Whoever thinks they're somebody, they're right. Some body.” Nolan didn't interfere with their pride, but he didn't throw compliments around either, just eased gradually into his system: moving the limb in question or getting squared away with the non-limb. Not looking back. Not forward either, any distance into what might or might not be achieved. Just right in front of you.

They were not allowed to skip a session but they could feel free to yell at the top of their lungs; they could curse, weep, soil themselves for spite. Nolan said it was a pity the doctors didn't get to see what some of these patients had in them, the pain they volunteered for, the feats they were capable of.

Mary Ann saw the doctors step inside the gym in their hard shoes to make suggestions. When Nolan was the one who knew. There was mind and there was body, and on the washed-out road between them, he waited for her every day. At their wedding he said, “I know two things: what bad luck is, and what good luck is.”

S
HE
held her baby, touched his ear. Tory. Sometimes her love for him sent a shudder through her so strong it woke him up if she
was holding him. All things fell to one side or the other of a line like a tennis net: safe or unsafe.

“Your mother was just the same, when you were a little one,” her father said. For her mother had died.

Now whenever she read about a man who had run over his girlfriend or gone after his wife and kids with a shotgun, she checked the name, she read to the end, she turned on the news. This was a few years before you could track people down on a computer. It couldn't be him, though; he was in a hospital, probably in Canada. He was Canadian.

“He put that accent on,” her father said on one of his visits, with a deep sigh. “He wasn't Canadian.” She saw that her father, and if her father, then others as well, had information she did not have. “Dennis Vose . . .” her father began.

“It's snowing!” she said from the window.

“It's not going to stick.” For a minute she was in two lives, so clearly did she hear her mother say that. The wet snow trickled down the pane and she had the unwelcome thought of her mother as she had been long ago, when she was still an English professor and had ideas about everything, including the weather, art, poems, the health of children, what to wear, what made people believe in a God, and how her friends wished they had a child like Mary Ann, whom she had decided on first looking into her eyes, burning with infant wisdom, would be named after George Eliot.

“Not for the looks,” her father would always add.

The baby woke up crying. He gave her a wild look, and when she picked him up he shivered as if she had found him lying out in the snow instead of in his crib. Already, after so few months of life, it seemed a baby could be visited by dreams. “I'll always, always come,” she told him.

W
HEN
he was old enough, they told him she had hurt her head and there was a plate in it for protection. With fingers infinitely gentle, he liked to tap and rub her scalp, exploring for the snowflakes. Of course he didn't know what had happened to require them. She didn't want her son to think of such a thing, her warmhearted, dreamy little boy with his spontaneous songs. Nothing
prepared you for motherhood, for the tide that knocked what was left of any other life right off the shelf, while you waded around it and sloshed it out of your way, with your child held close, held above it, above all things.

“I
WAS
a drummer,” Nolan said. “That meant you had to drink like crazy but not lose the beat. For me it was one or the other, so I went back to school.” He was talking to her father, who had perked up as he always did when Nolan was around. They had driven down from Seattle to give him some exercises for his arthritis. He liked talking to Nolan, sitting at the breakfast table with Tory on his lap. “I had a physiology professor tell me why not forget the whole thing, join the navy,” Nolan said.

“What? What?” her father said in an old man's loud voice that made Tory turn to look up at his face. “You could have taught
him
something.”

“Hope I won't have to,” Nolan said.

S
HE
had a different handwriting. Strong smells gave her a headache. She no longer had any blue clothes. She prayed. Not to God. But when she was waiting for her son at the door of the preschool she prayed steadily. Not because she was anxious. “Don't worry,” the aides were always saying. She was not worried, she was praying him back to her. While the other mothers talked by their cars, when the high syllables of the last song rang out behind the shut door, the prayer intensified until it was answered.

S
HE
and Tory, whose shots were behind him, were watching the clinic fish steer in and out of a pearly castle when suddenly the woman who had come out of one of the doors behind the receptionist turned into Teresa. She was heavy, with blonde hair instead of brown, and a stethoscope around her neck. She looked up. “Oh my God,” she said, steadying herself with a hand on the receptionist's shoulder. “Mary Ann!” She ran out into the waiting room and hugged Mary Ann as if she had been searching everywhere for her.

“And this, this beautiful child is yours? Your little boy?” said
Teresa, squatting down in front of Tory with her hands out in a way that said to Mary Ann that she might clutch him.

“He's shy,” Mary Ann said.

“I'm not shy,” he said.

“Oh my God. Mary Ann! Come into the back, come into my office so we can talk. I don't have a patient right now. Are you waiting—who are you waiting to see?”

“Dr. Cooley. We saw her. We're just waiting for a prescription.”

“I'll tell her I've stolen you. Oh, this is unbelievable. I'm just here on a locum, I don't even work here. Oh my God. How many years is it? And how old are you, little buddy? I bet you're . . . five.”

“I'm five,” he said.

Mary Ann couldn't pin down when Teresa must have graduated and gone away, so she said, “I haven't seen you in a long time.”

“Nine years? Ten? Is he your only one?”

As if there could be another. As if this love could be repeated. Mary Ann nodded.

“I have three,” said Teresa as if to apologize. “I married Alex.”

“Alex . . .”

“You remember Alex.”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do, I think.”

“We went to Chicago for our residencies and then he did a fellowship year,” said Teresa, leading the way into an examining room, “and then we lived in Chicago again so I sort of don't know what happened to anybody. Sit right up on that stool, sweetie.” Tory had already climbed up and sat swinging his legs. “Mary Ann, Mary Ann. So. How are you?”

“I'm fine.”

“So-o . . . tell me.”

“Tell you?”

“All about you.”

“Oh, OK. Well, remember Nolan?”

“Of course I remember
Nolan
.”

“We got married.”

“You got married.” Teresa did the thing with her hands again that made Mary Ann think she might be going to grab her. “And had this beautiful child.”

“I didn't get pregnant for a long time, but then I did.”

“Yes, you did. I can't believe this. I can't believe I'm seeing you. And your son!”

“We live here,” Mary Ann explained, to settle her down. “Nolan's at the same place. The hospital.”

“Where's my Spiderman?” Tory whispered to her.

“Everybody just scattered!” Teresa went on. “We just came back and I've hardly seen anybody from the old days. Well anyhow, I'm a pediatrician. Can you believe it? Who would have thought? Did you think I'd be an old married lady in Peds? Remember when I was going to put an ad in
The Stranger
?”

“Here he is,” said Mary Ann, handing Tory Spiderman from her purse.

“That's all I thought about in those days. I know I went out a lot but I didn't have the boyfriends, like you did.” Teresa smacked herself on the forehead. “Did I really say that?”