Tide King (44 page)

He took the bag from her outstretched hand and looked at it, turning the fragile skeleton around and around in its plastic casing.

He was silent, still holding the herb, and she could not tell what he was thinking.

“I'm going to stay with Ms. Webster tonight,” Heidi continued. She took the straps of her backpack in one hand and placed the other on the door. “Why don't you come upstairs? Maybe I can call you a cab or we can get you to the bus station tomorrow.”

“You're not coming?” He asked suddenly, looking at her.

“Um…no.” She let go of the handle and looked back at him. “I need to get everything straightened out with my father. But you should have the herb. My father would have wanted you to have it. I hope you can save Kate.”

“Your father also wouldn't have wanted you to be alone,” he said. “It's my responsibility as your father's friend to make sure you're taken care of.”

“I'm fine,” she answered, although she was not really sure. She'd already, under panic, botched her father's ascent into the afterlife in epic proportions. Who knew what else she would screw up, given the chance? “Really. You have the herb—don't worry about me.”

“Heidi, I can't leave you like this.” He slipped the palm of his hand underneath the straps of her backpack and tugged it gently from her.

“I was planning to go with you.” She explained as he zipped open the top, exposing a crush of clothes now expanding into the open space. “I put everything in the truck while you dug up my father.”

He put the backpack on the seat and thought, his eyes piercing the air that hung stale between them. She watched his eyelids blink.

“Is there anything you need from Ms. Webster, up there in the apartment?” he asked finally.

“No.”

“Good.” He turned the key in the ignition. “Are you ready?”

“For what?”

“To go.” He threw the lever into drive. She felt her stomach tumble. Perhaps he did care for her. “I already found the herb in your things, while I was waiting here in the parking lot. I could have already left without you.”

“It's all right Calvin—I'm not in trouble. At least, I hope not very much trouble. I don't think running away is going to help my case.”

“I don't care about any of that, Heidi. I just want you to come. Will you please come with me?”

“I don't know, Calvin.” She paused, looking through the windshield at the darkened bedroom window of Ms. Webster's apartment. “I just…everything is happening so fast.”

“You're right.” He pulled the key out of the ignition and handed it to her. “You're going to be okay, Heidi. You're going to have a great life.”

“You too.” She sighed, took the key from him and put it in her pocket. She felt it dig into her skin. “I hope you are able to get help for yourself.”

He nodded, and they stood in front of the apartment complex.

“You should give me an address.” He zipped up his jacket, the collar up, grazing his chin. “So I can let you know how things are.”

“You can come back and visit.” She shrugged, moving toward the steps. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to him. She thought of Oliver and Shauna and the other kids in her classes, saw them in varying degrees of transparency. Perhaps they were always that way, even herself, and it took someone as solid as Calvin Johnson for her to feel the weight of other things. She pulled away, and the air between them seemed to dissipate into him.

“Well, okay, kid.” He nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“Okay.” She nodded back, feeling a weight in her throat. She watched him walk away, out of the complex, out of her life. She had been given what she wanted, and she let him walk away. She sat on the steps, cracked and bubble-gummed, in front of Ms. Webster's apartment building. Two apartments up and over, a couple's argument escalated from angry murmurs to full-throated screams. She thought of Ms. Webster in the bed upstairs and wondered whether she slept on one side or sprawled across. She did not know why it mattered. She slipped upstairs, back into the apartment and opened the bedroom door. Ms. Webster lay on the left side of the bed, close to the alarm clock, her limbs folded carefully on the sheet. For a moment, she thought to crawl in next to her, to fill the space. To wake up and know she was not alone, that someone cared for her. To be Heidi Polensky again. She shook her head. She was no longer Heidi Polensky. But who she was, she didn't know yet. She ran back to the parking lot, got in the truck, and gunned it up the street, not stopping until she saw him walking on the side of the highway. Pulling in front of him, she idled and blew the horn.

He left Heidi at the American Museum of Natural History with twenty dollars spending money and took a cab to the east nineties. Inside, the help led him to a sunroom in the back of the brownstone. Kate lay bundled in a chaise lounge, a coffee table book of Japanese wood block prints open on the floor. He had not been gone long, but so much had changed.

“Your secretary told me you'd been home the past few days,” he explained. Pictures of Kate and her husband, her sons, made a daisy chain around the room's perimeter. It was not a space for them, her private sanctuary, fortress, and he wished he had thought to leave a message with her assistant instead. “She said to visit you between 1 and 5, to miss your husband, but I can leave. I understand.”

“It's okay.” She waved her hand, dismissively, carelessly, he could not decipher. The help appeared behind him. “Marjorie, could you bring me some hot tea? And please bring Calvin whatever he'd like. We have a rather extensive scotch collection, courtesy of my husband.”

“No, that's okay.” Calvin shook his head as Marjorie stepped out.

“Why?” She laughed dryly. “Do you feel it's improper to drink another man's scotch without his permission? What about sleeping with his wife?”

“You're right—I was completely out of line.”

“Calvin, I'm just joking.”

“I meant I should probably have taken the scotch.”

“See?” She patted the Chippendale across from her. It looked like a museum piece. Johnson sat on the edge, careful that the caulks of his boots did not catch the Persian rug. “We still have fun together.”

“Did we stop?”

“Well, I started to die, and you stopped dying.” She took the tea off the silver service that Marjorie brought in. “That always puts a damper on a party.”

“How are you feeling?”

“A bit terrible. I had my radiation treatments on Monday.”

“Can you stop them?”

“Part of the protocol.” She sipped her tea. “Palmer got me into a trial a couple of months ago. An experimental drug and radiation. But now, I'm thinking of dropping out.”

“Don't.” He reached over and touched her foot through the afghan. “I have some news for you. I have the herb.”

“Yes? Congratulations.”

“I was hoping for a little more enthusiasm.”

“I'm so tired, Calvin.” She closed her eyes.

“Of what?”

“Of everything. Even if I could get up, I don't know if I'd want to go out, see the park, the city. I just don't know the point of it anymore.”

“I was hoping…” he looked toward the window, thinking of his shoes, tissues, anything but her, and forced the tears back into his eyes. “I was hoping we could spend some time together. Now that I have the herb, that maybe, after all this time, there'd be time for us.”

“That's right.” She smiled at him, although it was not happiness she communicated. “You have all the time in the world. There's no urgency ever, is there?”

He sat back on the Chippendale. His chest burned, his hands shook. “The only good thing about having time is that I can wait forever for you.”

“Even if I'm running out of it?” She looked toward the window. The light caught her eyes, coffee brown, and time had not mottled them.

“It doesn't have to be like that.” He watched her hand sweep the floor for a pill bottle, the pills that replaced her vitality, drowned her quietly in amorphia.

“What do you propose, Mr. Johnson?” Her hand knocked over the bottle, and he squatted beside her, retrieving it, putting the large yellow capsule in her palm.

“Don't push me out.” He put his face near hers, felt her breath, light and uneven, in his ear. “Don't push me away. I'm not going to listen to you anymore. I'm not going to go away.”

“You're going to stay here and watch me die?” She laughed.

“I'm not leaving.” He kissed her neck, felt her spine through the flesh. He lingered on her skin, cold and dry, searching for the thrill that had surged through it so many years before, in plump, pulsing veins. He felt her hands touch his back, rest there, he felt the weight of them and he fought the urge to weave his arms under her, draw her to him, lift her from the chaise lounge and take her somewhere, somewhere away from this life and these memories and fill her full of him, full of them. He felt the wet on her neck, salty roads that traveled from her cheeks to her collarbone, and he followed them with his lips up to her eyes and kissed her lids, buoyant with tears, closed.

“Don't leave,” she murmured, and he kissed her cheeks, her forehead, her eyelids, her lips, but she did not kiss him back. She moved her hands up his back and through his hair.

He sat while she struggled with air, with breathing, while she coughed. He wiped the saliva that formed on the corner of her lips. She slumped, the drugs pressing down on her like a thumb. He wondered what was happening deep in her skin, what was happening in his own.

“I didn't ask for this.” He clenched his fists. “You try being the last person to die, always. To know that everyone you meet, you'll watch die. To wonder what the point of it all is.”

“I'm sorry.” She put her hand to her face. The light dimmed, and rain drew on the windows, long blemished shapes. They symbolized nothing but seemed to mock them all the same. “I am selfish not to think of your pain. Me, I should be happy to die. At least it is possible for me.”

He felt the herb in his pocket.

“You don't have to die, either,” he said.

“You're going to whisk me off to the Palmer's laboratory and cytogenetically freeze me until you figure out how to die?” She smiled at him, and he felt it, a glimmer of hope, of youth. Of an intimacy they had shared once, long ago, when they were both young and at the horizon line together. Before he found out that his was an illusion.

“Take the herb.” He pulled the plastic bag out of his pocket and dangled it in front of her.

“How do you know it works?” She studied the bag, but he could not determine the line of her interest.

“I got it from Stanley Polensky's daughter,” he answered. “Will you eat it?”

“Is it going to turn me into a young woman? Or will it preserve me at my current age?”

“I don't know what it will do.” He dropped the bag on the chair, between her hands. “I just want to be with you for the rest of my life.”

“Then be with me for the rest of my life,” she answered, closing her eyes. “However little is left.”

“You won't take it, then?” He cupped her cheek in his hand. “Will you think about it? Kate, I've waited so long for you, and to think of all the years that will pass without us ever seeing each other again, not even in death…I will tear the world apart. I will destroy the world if you're not in it.”

“I'll think about it, Calvin,” she answered, then opened her eyes. “You mustn't think…that I don't love you. You mustn't think that I don't care about you. I'm in pain, and I've been in pain for so long, that I've hidden from you, looking for ways to stop the spread, and I've finally accepted that the amount of time I've been allotted is up. I'm not terribly religious or fatalistic, but the real truth of my cancer, my age, the fact that my life—our lives—didn't turn out exactly as we had hoped for doesn't mean they are invalid, that we're free to manipulate them, change them. Perhaps there was a reason things were this way and perhaps not. I'm only a person, a molecule in the sea. I don't expect to change the tides.”

“But what if you could? What if I could?”

“Perhaps you never existed, Calvin Johnson,” she said. “Perhaps you're a morphine-induced vision, fully formed with past and future in my mind. Someone to save me. Someone to help me cope. My own King Cnut, here to turn back the tides.”

“And what if I am?”

“Cnut never turned back the tides.” She looked at him steadily, her lids heavy, fluttering. He took her hands.

“I've waited all my life for you. To be told now that I've been…delusional, why not thirty years ago? Why give me any glimmer of hope? Why?”

“Don't you believe I held onto that same glimmer?” she said. “I wouldn't leave my husband. But I thought maybe there'd be a time when I'd see you again…and we did, for a little while. Now, there is no time. But what if we had more time? Would we have cared for each other more than we already do? You are beautiful, a marvel of genetics. A curse to yourself and others. I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little scared of you. Perhaps I should have stayed in Ohio with you. I was young and stupid then.”

“You were never stupid.” He laid his head on the edge of the chaise lounge, closed his eyes.

“But I was young, yes?” she laughed. “Not too hideous back then, I hope.”

“You're beautiful.” He drew the line of her lips with his finger, leaned forward to kiss her. “What would we have named our children?”

“Oh, dear—I don't know.” She turned her face to his. “I always wanted a little girl named Caroline.”

“I always wanted a little girl, too.” He closed his eyes. “Where do you suppose we went on our honeymoon?”

“Well, I don't think we would have had much money back then. I was still in school, and you were a bit underemployed after the war. Assuming we got married at City Hall in New York, we could have taken the train to Coney Island, eaten some hot dogs at Nathan's, gone on the Parachute Jump.”