The Colorman (27 page)

Rain ran back to the cabin as the ambulance pulled away. Inside, she scrambled into her gear hanging by the door, the rain-proof pants that matched the slicker she was still wearing, the long boots and her helmet. She took the Vespa on the shortcut up through the woods on the path that joins Route 9D a little further south. She couldn't see the lights of the ambulance, but she could still hear it and knew the way to the hospital since it was near the hardware supply store and she had passed it many times throughout the fall. Swearing all along the way that she would finally get herself a car, she pushed the Vespa to its limit through the driving rain. It was that promise to herself that made her realize she intended to stay in Vanderkill.

The rain fell in torrents, forcing her to the side of the road a few times where she sat, abject and soaking, realizing she was too far from home to turn back, too far from the hospital to push forward. It took almost two hours to cover the twenty miles.

When she arrived, Rain locked the Vespa at the front of the hospital near a motorcycle, locked her helmet into the seat, and went to the broad entrance to peel off her wet gear, the exhaustion pulsing through her veins. At the reception desk she asked a grandmotherly lady if a James Morrow was checked in and if she could see him. The lady found him in the computer and directed her to the third floor.

Rain felt dwarfed in the triple-wide elevator. It was roomsized, big enough for three gurneys and moved so slowly you could feel no shift of gravity as it started or stopped.

At the nurses' station, Rain received grave glances when she asked for Morrow, A mixture of suspicion, pity and jadedness.

A tall nurse whose perfectly crafted makeup and tangle of delicate gold jewelry contrasted with her Peanuts-themed scrubs stood reluctantly and pivoted around the desk. “You wanna get a coffee?” she asked Rain. “They're just finishing him up.”

“Yes, please,” Rain said. “I'd love something hot.”

“It's on the way. Here,” the nurse said, waving a well-manicured hand toward a break room.

Rain poured the weak but fresh-smelling coffee into a paper cup then looked up to find the nurse holding a large clear plastic bag out to her. “Oh, the…uh…” Rain said, lowering the rumpled yellow heap of her wet rain-gear into the bag. “Thanks.”

“Yeah,” the nurse said. She kicked some towels around the floor without much amusement, and then gestured Rain to follow her out the other side of the break-room.

“You can sit right there,” the nurse said. “I'll see if they're ready.” She slipped in through a closed door. Propping it open as she returned, she held up her hand and said, “They'll come out in just a sec. You can go right in when they're finished.”

The coffee warmed her slowly from the inside. Rain shoved away the thought that she was going to have to get back to Vanderkill somehow. She had drained the cup by the time three people emerged from the room. One with a stethoscope shot her a look as she stood.

“Are you the doctor?” Rain asked her.

The woman, blonde, very young-looking, brought her hand to the stethoscope she was wearing. “No, I'm the P.A., are you related?”

“No,” Rain said, not sure what P.A. actually stood for, and then she screwed up her face wondering at the question again, and then concluded, “No.”

“You don't seem sure,” the P.A. said through a small laugh.

“I just…” Rain faltered, “recently found out he had been married to my mother. Making him…my stepfather I guess?”

“Uh, yeah?” the P.A. looked down at her clip board and raised her eyebrows. “Is there any other family?”

“Not that I know of…” Rain put her hand up to her face. It was shaking a little so she brought it back down again. She hadn't meant to put herself in this position. She just couldn't see him going all by himself. “I have no idea,” she concluded.

“Okay, I don't think you can sign for this, anyway. I need to call his emergency contact. It's his lawyer, I think.”

“I'm sorry, you're the…?” Rain said, shaking her head and smiling.

“Physician's Assistant,” the woman said. “I'm also in medical school,” she added a little defensively, as though Rain were questioning her credentials.

“Oh, I didn't mean to…” Rain began.

“What's that?”

“I just came to see if he was okay.”

“He's stable now. You can go in,” she paused and then lightened her attitude. “We made him a little more comfortable, but I don't think he has very long.”

“Thank you,” Rain answered earnestly. “Thank you.” She entered the darkened room. It was a double, but the other bed was empty, the lights low.

James was clean and tucked tightly in the sheets. One of his thin arms protruded from the dotted hospital gown with the IV, a cuff and some bandages. The other arm was under the covers at his side. His eyes were closed and he was breathing steadily to the beep of the heart monitor, but somehow he didn't seem asleep to Rain. Something in his breathing wasn't peaceful.

She circled the foot of the bed to sit in a chair by the window and let her bag of wet gear down to the floor. She tossed her coffee cup and it hit the bottom of the trash can with a clunk. Rain was alarmed as his eyelids fluttered and opened.

When he saw her his eyes warmed and squinted slightly with what looked like love and gratitude.

“Al…” he whispered.

“It's Rain,” Rain whispered back to him.

“You look so beautiful,” James said to her. “So…beautiful. I knew you'd come to me.” He closed his eyes again, letting the smile slowly fall from his lips and then quieting again into sleep. Rain sat and looked at him a while longer and then went into the bathroom.

When she returned, his eyes were open again.

“I thought I'd been dreaming,” he said quietly, as she rounded the end of the bed.

“How do you feel?” Rain asked.

“I don't. They're good at that.”

“Sounds like you have some experience with this,” Rain said looking down into her lap.

“They've known me pretty well here for the last year or so,” James replied.

They sat quietly for a few moments. Finally Rain looked up to see if he had gone to sleep again, but he appeared to be wide awake. He was looking at her intently.

“A part of me doesn't really believe it,” James said. “That perpetual two-year-old inside me doesn't buy that there's such a thing as the end.” His gaze steadied on her as he spoke lucidly all of a sudden. “But another part of me, maybe the rest of me, is completely aware.”

Rain opened her mouth to speak, but James cut her off.

“No,” he said quickly. “I need to ask your forgiveness.”

“For what?” Rain said.

“For her, for Alice, I need you to forgive her.” James' voice was desperate.

“But I,” Rain began, and she pushed out a little laugh. Not meaning to insult him. He was putting such weight on this. “No, I mean, I have no feelings about her.”

“I need you to forgive her,” James said again.

“Do you need to forgive her?”

“I need you to forgive her,” James said.

Rain thought he was fading again and she looked down into her lap.

“I'll do that,” Rain promised gently, not looking at him. “I'll forgive her.”

James moved his mouth wordlessly like he was tasting something, swallowed painfully and then whispered, “I just want to look. Look at you. Is that alright?”

“Yes, alright,” she said very quietly and she looked into his eyes, bravely and silently.

She tried to act courageously, so aware that he was dying, aware that there was something in her face that he was taking and that she was willing to give. But she was also fascinated by his face as it soared and plummeted through emotions, memories, connection, surrender. His mouth was slack, but the skin around his eyes was expressive, pulling in, opening up again. Rain fell into his eyes, the depth of their darkness—it was the exhaustion, she was sure of it, but she was falling into a kind of meditative state, and suddenly she was not sure how long they had been in that dimly lit room staring into each other's eyes, and where she actually was and who this was, but she was sure that he loved her, truly loved her. That he was staring at her for her, Rain Morton, not for the mother she never knew. That staring at her in this way, he was finally relinquishing the hold he had kept on Alice all these years.

“Okay?” Rain asked, very quietly, and James blinked a slow assent. Okay.

He closed his eyes again. He hadn't moved at all, she noticed, and his breathing grew uneven again. It seemed that he was not asleep, but waiting.

Rain leaned back in the chair and instantly fell asleep. She dreamed of love, of Hunter and of Karl, of her first love at summer camp when she was seventeen, of her father, of James, and of Gwen. And of Alice. All the kinds of love in their great variety, but all genuine, all as deeply felt, all as meaningful and real. In her dream there were no boundaries, there was no betrayal, no hurt or abandonment, there was only that same love flowing in and out between all of them, all people, all time and experience.

It was still night when Rain woke up. James was awake, but she couldn't tell if he was really there. She shifted up in the chair and saw that his eyes followed her. She smiled at him and leaned forward toward him.

His eyes welled with tears and he moved his mouth a little, but no sound came out.

“It's okay,” Rain said, and she reached out to touch his arm.

His mouth quivered again. “I wanted to…” he said in a scratchy voice.

“It's okay,” Rain whispered. “I know, it's okay.”

“For you,” he mouthed, and then it was just over.

Rain didn't need to hear the monitor's beep to know he was gone. She stood and stepped back toward the window, expecting a rush of people. When none came, she moved toward the door just as the Physician's Assistant and two nurses walked quickly into the room. One of them glanced at Rain and then at the clipboard.

“Uh, it said no, uh…” the nurse began.

“It's okay,” the P.A. interrupted him. “She's not next-of.”

“Oh,” he said. “Do you mind waiting outside?” he asked her.

“Yep,” Rain said. “I just need…” she looked over toward the chair and the bag of crumpled yellow lying there at its feet, but then thought better of it and backed out into the hallway.

The nurse shut the door gently. Rain walked back down the hallway to the break-room where a couple hovered over a tray of doughnuts. The woman was hugely pregnant and wearing several hospital gowns. Her partner dithered over the pastries as she teased him lightly.

“No, don't worry about me, go right ahead,” she said laughing.

“I won't,” he said, wrapping his arm around her broad back and taking hold of her rolling I.V. stand.

“You HAVE to!” she said to him, still laughing. “I need you strong and happy! I can't have you passing out on me again!”

“I didn't pass out!” he insisted.

“You looked like you were going to…”

“I've never done this before,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, and I've…”

“No sarcasm, remember?” he said, kissing her on the ear.

“I love you.”

“How do you feel?” he said, nuzzling her.

“Just take a doughnut and let's go back to walking,” she said, laughing again.

“Okay, just one…” The man stuffed an entire powdered sugar doughnut in his mouth. “Whamph?” he asked indignantly to the woman's shocked look.

Then they saw Rain. The woman laughed. “How ‘bout that, huh?”

“Congratulations,” Rain said.

“Oh, we're just getting started,” the woman said. “Come on, you,” she said to the man and they ambled off down the hallway.

Rain fixed another coffee and stared down the hallway toward James' room. A window at the end of the hall glowed bright blue, the night having let go its darkness to the new dawn.

The vines around the front door had been sheared back to nothing. The house itself was nearly empty, all the blank displays stacked neatly by, even much of the furniture was gone. An archival box, about the size of a tombstone, was sitting alone on a table.

Standing in the middle of James' house, Rain looked around. When she spotted the box she walked to it, practically on tip-toe. Inside, Rain found a stack of overstuffed, densely worked sketchbooks and a photo album stuffed with photographs. The sketches were mostly stylized landscapes. They nearly always featured a swath of flat river and a straight slice of train track. Some of the sketches were super-macro details of track, the scraped metal rendered like light itself. Others were abstracted details of light reflecting off water. Notes were scribbled here and there along the pages. Some were just dates, some were inscrutable and poetic. Rain flipped through and looked at the photos, feeling she needed time, hours, years to take them in.

Most of the photographs were of a young Alice. Rain's father appeared in some of the later photographs, in groups of friends, then in portraits.

Rain put it all back into the box and closed it. Glancing around at James' unfamiliar emptied house, she looked at a photograph she had held onto in her hand. It was of James and Alice laughing with John in a moment of perfect balance, before things tipped. A moment of pure light and ease.

James' face was open and carefree in a way she had never seen. Her father was healthy and robust and naïve, too, in a way she had never seen in him. Alice was sylph-like in the picture. Her clear blue eyes alight as she laughed, her bangs blown free of her face. She and James leaned forward toward John enthusiastically and he seemed to take them both in equally in a way Rain knew couldn't last. They looked happy. All three looked equally in love and grateful for each other. Friends who found each other as neighbors. The kind of love that was fierce and passionate and giddy and that eventually cannot be stood.