The Emerald Light in the Air (19 page)

Billy saw a bed pushed up under the window at the back of the cabin. A woman was lying in it, and a man stood over her. The man spoke to the boy on the porch: “Caleb, put down that umbrella and get the doctor something to dry himself.”

Billy heard the other front door open and close, and he heard the sounds of the boy moving behind the dividing wall. Billy could feel his footfalls traveling through the floorboards.

“She's struggling,” the man said to Billy.

The bed was an old iron thing with a mattress on top. The woman had a coat draped over her and a bundle of clothes for a pillow. Rain spattered the windowsill above the bed but didn't seem to be getting on her.

“We've moved her from corner to corner all night, except where the floor's out. The water follows her,” the man explained.

“It's been quite the storm,” Billy said.

He picked his way across the damaged floor to the bedside. His shoes squished.

“Don't fall through,” the man said.

The man was bald and hadn't shaved—he wore the shadow of a beard. It was hard to tell if he was old, or maybe just Billy's age, and he spoke with an accent that reminded Billy of the Appalachian mountain speech he'd heard when he was a boy, but which, even so, he couldn't place—it wasn't local.

“I'll be careful,” Billy said. He felt as if he were seeing through a fog. The splashing rain on the windowsill made a mist in the air, but it was also the pot, deranging his balance, his sense of perspective.

At the bedside, Billy leaned down and saw the woman shudder beneath the coat that was covering her. Then she was still. The door in the dividing wall opened, and the boy appeared and handed him a damp, dirty piece of cloth, a towel, of sorts.

“Thank you,” Billy said.

The man said to the boy, “Go find your brother and tell him the doctor's arrived.” The boy left the room through the front door. To Billy, the man said, “We didn't mean to be staying here.”

They stood over the woman on the bed. Why were there no chairs? Everything looked wrecked and rotten.

Billy went down on his knees. The man said, “I know there's nothing to be done,” and knelt, too.

The woman's eyes were closed and her mouth was open. Her skin seemed stretched, and her lips were parched. The man told Billy that she'd taken neither food nor water for some time. He and Billy faced each other over her. There was a moment when Billy's heart raced. The man studied him. Billy looked down. The man said, “You're not a doctor, are you?”

“No, I'm not. I'm sorry.”

“But you're here.”

Billy explained, “I teach junior high over in Crozet. I was on my way to the dump to throw some things out.”

“The dump's not up here.”

“The road was blocked. I took the creek and wrecked on the rocks.”

Billy heard footsteps on the porch. The door opened and the cabin shook as Caleb and his brother came in. The brother was bigger than Caleb, older, and wore a dark shirt. They stood dripping side by side at the foot of the bed, and Billy remembered sitting at his own mother's deathbed, feeding her a mixture of morphine drops and Ativan, squeezing her hand, and telling her he would miss her, while her breaths came farther and farther apart.

The woman on the bed inhaled. Her dark hair was fanned out around her head.

The man told the boys, “I want you two to go down to the creek and bring the doctor's car.”

“It's stuck,” Caleb said.

“That's what the doctor told me,” the man said, and added, “The doctor and I will stay with her.”

“The flood may have washed it away,” Caleb said.

“Go see. Go on.”

The brothers backed away from the bed.

The man asked Billy his name, and in that moment, Billy could not say—he felt too disoriented to speak. He raised one hand and pulled the coat more neatly and more fully across the woman, tucking the collar around her neck; the tail reached almost to her feet. He saw that she was wearing socks. Her feet were tiny. He was shaking.

He tried to take a deeper breath. He felt his grandfather's gloves shrinking and tightening as they dried on his hands.

“I can help her,” he said finally.

Light came dully through the window, and seemed to drip down between the beams overhead. Billy listened to the softening rain. He reached inside his shirt pocket and clumsily got hold of the pill bottle. He said, “This will help her rest.”

It took him some time to open the cap. He peered down into the bottle. There was a handful of pills. He thought to take one himself, maybe more than one. But there were so few; he didn't. Instead, he asked the man, “Do you have any water?”

“Water?” the man said.

“Is there a tap?”

“No,” the man said. “There's a pump out back.”

Billy held the open bottle in one hand. With his other hand, he reached up to the window. He stuck his hand out to catch the rain in the bottle cap. He said to the man, “I want you to watch what I'm doing.” Then he held the bottle cap over the woman's mouth. He let a drop, and another, fall.

He shook a pill from the bottle.

“Like this,” he said.

He leaned over the woman. He held the pill unsteadily between his thumb and forefinger, between the raised seams at the fingertips of his glove. He tucked the pill beneath the woman's lower lip, near her cheek, and then reached up and caught more rain. “Give her water with the pill.”

He shook the cap dry, then put it back on the bottle and told the man to give her four or five a day. “There should be enough here to get her through,” he said.

“Thank you for your kindness,” the man said.

After a moment, Billy left the bedside. He stepped across the broken floor planks and opened the front door. Thunder rolled in the far distance. He stood on the porch, in the drizzle, and tried to stop trembling.

It isn't the shock. It's the brain seizure, brought on by the shock. Atropine goes in, to keep the heart working. The anesthetic follows, and, after that, succinylcholine, which paralyzes the body. Life support is necessary. A blood-pressure cuff inflated tightly around one ankle keeps the succinylcholine out of the foot, which, when the shock is given, shows the seizure as twitching toes. The head and the heart are wired: electroencephalograph to scalp; electrocardiograph to body. A bite plate goes between the teeth, and an oxygen mask covers the face. The anesthetic has a sweet smell; the patient loses consciousness ten or fifteen seconds after it enters the blood. That done, the doctor places the paddles against the forehead. Optimally, the seizure, the convulsion, should last twenty, thirty, forty seconds. Shorter or longer is less effective. There must be enough anesthetic in the blood to keep the patient unconscious but not so much that it soaks the brain and dampens the seizure. The anesthetic is short-lived, and the procedure is over in minutes. The anesthetic goes in, blackness comes, and then suddenly, as if nothing had taken place, the nurse's voice asks, “Can you tell me where you are?”

He heard a noise and saw lights. It was the Mercedes coming toward him along the avenue of trees.

He stepped down off the porch into the mud.

The boy was driving. His brother sat beside him. The boy parked in front of Billy, like a valet at a restaurant. He rolled down the window and called, “We brought the car.”

“You brought the car,” Billy said.

“The flood almost took it down the mountain.”

“I thought it surely would have.”

“We got it in time,” the boy said, and Billy said, “Your mother is sleeping.”

The boy got out, leaving the door open for Billy. “Come on,” he said to his brother.

The hood and the roof were covered with leaves, and scratches and dents ran along the body of the car, where it had crunched onto the rock.

The boy pointed. “Drive between the trees and don't cross the creek. Follow the side of the mountain. Turn left at the train tracks. There's a busted fence. Go through it and drive across the field. There's an empty house and a pond. Go past the house to the gate. The road is on the other side.”

“Okay,” Billy said.

He watched the brothers climb onto the porch, kick the mud off their shoes, and go through the right-side door into the cabin.

Billy swept the leaves off the car with his hand—first the roof, then the hood—and pulled more from under the wipers. He got in the car. The rain had about stopped. He rolled up the window, just in case. His scraped hands hurt beneath the gloves, but he could hold the wheel.

He drove out of the hollow, and the gray sky opened to view. He heard the rushing creek on his left, and kept going. It wasn't long before he had to thread between trees and under branches. He saw only glimpses of sky. A deer jumped in front of the car and scared him, and several times he had to back up and redirect the Mercedes around fallen logs. He didn't know how far he'd come, but he could feel the slope of the mountain rising beside him on his right.

He was on the tracks before he saw them. They were ancient and broken, buried in the weeds. He turned left and followed them. The Mercedes bumped along over the crooked ties. After a mile or so, he saw the field and the fence that the boy had told him to look for, and, beyond the field, the empty house and the pond.

He relaxed his grip on the wheel. He took his time crossing the waterlogged grass. He stopped at the gate, put the lever in park, and got out. The gate was chained and locked. He yanked on the lock. “Fuck me,” he said, and walked back to the car.

He opened the trunk and retrieved the Browning, unzipped the case, and removed the rifle. He took a bullet from the box and loaded the gun. He walked over and stood about ten feet from the gate, raised the rifle to his shoulder, and aimed. It took one shot. The lock jumped and settled. Billy expelled the shell, walked up to the gate, removed the shattered lock from the chain, unwrapped the chain from the fence, and pushed open the gate. He carried the gun, the chain, and the lock to the car. He put the Browning into its case, and the lock and the chain into the canvas bag full of cans. Before shutting the trunk, he walked back to where he'd fired the gun. It took him a minute to find the shell. He picked it out of the grass, then tossed it into the bag with the other things. Before closing the trunk, he opened his box of comic books. He didn't take any out. He knew what they were, pretty much. He should have given them to the boys. He closed the trunk, took his phone from his pocket, got into the driver's seat, pulled off one of his gloves, and dialed 911. The operator, a woman, said, “What is your emergency?”

“I want to report a dying woman, a woman who's dying,” he said.

“Can you tell me your name, sir?”

“My name is Billy French.”

“Where are you located?”

Billy looked about. He said, “I thought I was below Afton Mountain, but things don't look right. I'm in a field. There's a vacant house near a pond.”

“Can you be more specific, sir?”

Billy said, “She's in a cabin on the mountain. There's a man and two boys. You go through a field and along some rusted tracks. There's a kind of lane or alley or something in the woods.”

“I'll need an address, sir.”

“There is no address.”

“I need to know where the woman is, sir,” the operator said.

“I don't know,” he said.

“Sir?”

“I'm not sure.”

He hung up.

He turned off the phone and put it in the glove compartment. He put the driving glove back on his hand. He buckled his seat belt, steered up to the road, and looked both ways.

It was too late to make the trip to the dump. Mary was coming, and he had to get ready. He'd thought of braising a rabbit. Did he still have time for that?

Left or right? He turned the car to the left.

As he drove, he decided that he would keep Julia's paintings a while longer. He could clear some space in the attic, or stow them under a tarp in the barn.

He went over and down a hill. He had the mountains on one side and a cow pasture on the other. The sky above the mountains glowed. Soon the sun would come out and the day would be blue again. He was certain that the road would lead him somewhere familiar if he drove long enough. He rolled down the window and felt the fresh air on his face. The damp, shining road curved over the foothills, and the trees alongside seemed to become greener and lusher in the growing light, and before long a car passed him going the other direction; and, a little farther down the road, he did in fact come upon a house that he recognized. He slowed the car and pulled into the driveway. How had he got so far from home? He was all the way up past White Hall.

Soft white clouds and a few birds were in the air. The thunder and lightning were over at last.

Billy circled the drive, eased the Mercedes to the road, checked both directions, and went back the way he'd come.

 

 

ALSO BY DONALD ANTRIM

FICTION

Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

The Hundred Brothers

The Verificationist

NONFICTION

The Afterlife: A Memoir

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donald Antrim is the author of the novels
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
,
The Hundred Brothers
, and
The Verificationist
, as well as a memoir,
The Afterlife
. He is a regular contributor to
The New Yorker
and an associate professor in the writing program at Columbia University. He is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

 

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2014 by Donald Antrim

All rights reserved

First edition, 2014