Stars Go Blue (5 page)

Funny how he wasn't angry with Ray while Ray was in Cañon City prison. Not angry, just sad. His brain never considered Ray much. When he was in prison, Ray used to write notes of apology and memories and excuses and send them to Ben and Renny. Renny used to tack them up at Violet's Grocery alongside the
HAY FOR SALE
and
FREE KITTENS
signs and it was some need of hers to communicate this thing that was tearing her apart. But he found it inappropriate, as he did most of Renny's behaviors, and he would drive to the grocery and take them down. That he remembers.

But then last week they heard that Ray had been released. Del told them. Second-degree murder charges, is that what they were called? A class 2 Felony. Time was up. Or not really. How many years for one life? But there was earned time. Good behavior. No one, not even the judge, can accurately calculate the sentence. Like a math problem that can't be solved. Like a life. No one can calculate. No one knows. Del had sat them down at the kitchen table and said all this. He had presented them with a waxed bag with two Fern's Very Famous Cinnamon Rolls and had said, “Renny and Ben, I wanted to tell you. Jess and Billy know. You've probably been notified, or you will be. But I wanted to tell you myself. Ray's been released from prison. His time was up. He's going to Greeley—” and here Del glances at Ben, because Ben was born and raised in Greeley, and then he adds, “Just thought you should know.”

A switch flipped, then. Ben couldn't help it, but he started having conversations with Ray in his head each day, all day. He says,
Out, Ray, out
, but Ray is still in his brain. Ever since
Del told them, he has been walking and saying
Out Out Out
and walking more and saying
Out Out Out
and yet Ray has moved into his brain. Ray has moved into his brain, right next to the disease.

The conversations fill his mind like chickadees coming in for bread crumbs, always there, always there even when you try to shoo them away.

Out, coward.

Out, bully.

Out, small man. Drinking too much. Depressed. Feckless. So you say. But why? Because you're selfish.

Too lazy to be a good human. Lazy coward.

He heard something in that meeting he goes to that is not true. The woman said that it's very hard for people losing their memory to realize when they're moving into the new stage, the one where you don't remember that you have a remembering problem. But that is not true. He can tell. It is happening now, and he can tell how little time he has left. He knows. He knows he has to hurry. So that he can have this conversation for real. He wants to hold Ray up to his face and say it all. He will tell Ray all these conversations and then they will be out of his brain.

He will finally say these words. He will get them out of his brain. Because courage is fear that has said its prayers. The perfect words come to him in a flash.

He has already prayed and asked forgiveness from the universe. If he has upset the natural order of things. He has nearly forgiven himself. He has always been a gentle man, and in part, that has been the problem. He must rise up and be fierce for once. He has asked forgiveness for his gentleness and not fighting more for Rachel to come home, for not fighting when Rachel raced into his house, for not noticing fast enough that
Ray had a gun and was raising it, and for tackling Ray three seconds too late (exactly three because he has counted so many times), and that he has not done more good in his life. At least he can do this.

He has this disease with his brain—he can't remember what it's called—and he knows it gets worse. That's why Renny moved him back to the farmhouse, made him leave his little cabin. He remembers that room, how Renny found scraps of paper in his kitchen and stared at them a long time and said
oh god, oh god
. The names of his friends and the vet and his address and his hometown. He heard
oh god oh god
and he had been ashamed and scared. That is when she took him to the doctor who studies brains and she dumped the slips on the doctor's desk. The doctor asked him so many questions that his head hurt and then the doctor said, “I'm sorry,” and then talked about a drug called Aricept (for some reason he can remember that) but he had not taken it because Renny, at her computer, had read things that made her worry.

“A stupid crapshoot,” she had said.

“A stupid crapshoot,” he says now. Meaning not just the brain drug, but life. Although he reminds himself over and over that he got dealt a fairly good hand. Not great, but good. He could do without this disease, and he could do without a dead daughter, but the rest has been a fairly good hand.

“We sure helped a lot of things be born.” He says this when he walks into the kitchen, to his wife and daughter. They both turn and smile at him. Beautiful smiles in a warm kitchen. By god if he's going to gut his wife and daughter like a fish.

But he needs to hurry. He can feel the slip now, fast as a dam breaking and the sudden onslaught of water.

II.

 

“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else

my heart concealing it will break.”

—
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The Taming of the Shrew
(act 4, scene 3)

RENNY

S
he feeds the chickens, who are as annoyed with the winter as she. They have quit laying eggs nearly altogether, as if in protest, and eye her as if she's responsible for the short days and bad weather. She scowls back. None of this winter is her idea. She's done what she can to mitigate and help. She's even put in a light that flicks on at four in the morning, and she's given them extra vitamins, and their egg production should not, in fact, be so low. She does try, she does. Just as she feeds Ben. She does lather his face in the mornings, she does do his laundry, she does show him how to turn on the radio, she does drive him somewhere at least twice a week to get him out of the house. A thousand acts of kindness each day, for Ben and the chickens and the donkeys and the horses and she
does
do so much.

And no one loves her, not even the chickens, and no one notices, and no one cares.

“Give me an egg or two, girls.” She murmurs this to them in the cold-echo air of the cement-block chicken house, and in response, a mouse runs along the baseboard of the floor. She slides her hand under each chicken, each sitting in her own nesting box, and they gently peck her hand in protest. Fat Girl has one under her; Penny does not.

She stares at the globe in her hand.
E-G-G.
It should stand for something. Or maybe not. All the stupid acronyms in the world. People and their stupid need for letters. The Department of Corrections, DOC. Average length of stay, ALOS. Provisions of section 18-1.3-406. Colorado Murder in the Second Degree. The SORL1 protein. The NIA, National Institute on Aging. The NHGRI, the National Human Genome Research Institute. She wonders if Carolyn and the kids should get tested. They could let their hopes sink to the depth of the sea, where they belong. They can have their hearts be broken now, and get it over with. There is, in fact, some sense in that.

Perhaps someone in this family has it. Jess, probably. All that she has in common with him. Please let them not share that. Please, no.

One of the chickens near the end of the row lets out a cackle of egg-laying, and so she stands there, in the cold, waiting. Life is about efficiency. This chicken is the one that Jess once named Oh-Beetle-Beetle, and she hardly pecks at all. Not like Floppy, who can bring tears.

The beta-amyloid proteins. The presenilin 1, or PS1, genes and how they affect lysosomes, how they get mutated. She's never been stupid. She's kept books and invested well and guessed correctly when to cut the hay. She had a degree in animal sciences, but she was born in the wrong era—she just got married, without thinking about it—and she should have gone on to be a vet or a scientist. But she was good at the
business side of the ranch, and she kept the books, and she made up her own useful acronyms or codes. She wonders if she could ever tell a friend—perhaps Zach?—about all this. How her love for the ranch was manifested by making it
work
. By knowing all the words and columns and figures and facts.

She stamps her feet to warm up, glides her hand over the chicken, and then notices, with a start, how clean the chicken house is. The cement floor is mostly devoid of chicken shit; there's only the clean hay that has been kicked around by the chickens themselves. It's clean enough, in fact, that she knows it must have been cleaned today. She pauses, cocks her head. “Jess?” She calls it out, in the cool air of the chicken house, and then leans her head out the door and calls it again.

She stares into the silence created by the boom of her voice. A squirrel has paused halfway up a tree. The donkeys have raised their heads. The hayfields and distant mountains all sit in silent white. And then she hears the clink of hoof on wood, and she walks out of the chicken house and into the shed next door, the one in which they stack the best hay and alfalfa, and she sees Jess in there with Fury, the horse, both in the space created by missing bales, in a cavern created by still-green hay. The horse is standing, shifting his weight, but Jess is sitting on a bale, leaning against another bale, just
lying
there, in a ratty old sleeping bag, looking as if she's dozing. She's wearing a gray flannel shirt that used to belong to Ben and a Carhartt jacket and a bright pink hand-knitted hat that someone in the Alzheimer's support group made for her. She looks up at Renny with one eye.

“Warming up,” she says. “Smells good in here.”

“
Why
do you have a sleeping bag in a hay shed?”

Jess rubs her nose and shrugs.

“There's a
house
for warming up. You could come
inside
.”

“I like it here.”

Renny simply doesn't know what to do with blankness. “You just carry a sleeping bag around with you?” She cocks her head and stares. It's true that Jess is beautiful, more beautiful than anyone in the family. Fine dark brown hair and green eyes with eyelashes long enough to belong on a horse. A perfect dimple on one side, which rarely shows. Tall and slender and beautiful. A lot like Rachel, except that Jess has a still-noble presence and a quiet watchfulness that is like Ben. And it's this centeredness—Renny decides that's the right word—that gives Jess her deep beauty, which is shining so bright right now that Renny has to scowl at it, otherwise she will gasp.

“Well, yes. On the saddle.”

Jess always speaks with the tone of voice that ends conversations, no upward lilt, no invitation to keep speaking. She's done speaking, and Renny would like to strangle her. Instead, she pauses, breathes, tries to make her voice more pleasant. “Was it you that cleaned the chicken house?” And when Jess nods affirmative with a shrug, Renny nods at the room, then at Jess, which is her way of saying thanks. “Well, why aren't
you
going to Mexico? They could take you.”

Jess gives her a look of amused delight. “Goodness, Renny. It's a romantic getaway. Plus, I don't want to go.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want to be here right now.”

“And why is that?”

Jess shrugs, as if it's obvious. Then she says, “Renny, you're all right.”

Renny lets the horse nuzzle her jacket, which makes a swishing noise. “You want to be here, in this cold wasteland of an idiot winter, and stay by yourself in that house, and not go to Mexico, and not come stay with us. Do I have that right, Jess?”

“Yes,” Jess says.

Renny hears the gruff of her voice, and she tries to calm it. “Jess, I don't understand you. Not one bit.”

“I like it here.”

“But no
normal person
would like it here, Jess.”

Jess shrugs.

“Why don't you go talk to Grandpa, at least?”

“I just did. He went past me on his way on a walk, so I walked with him to the middle gate. He was talking about gutting fish. How we used to fish together and he'd gut the fish for me, because I didn't like it. He didn't like gutting fish either, it turns out. I didn't know that.”

Renny reaches out to stroke Fury's neck. The horse, at least, is deserving of some attention. But she will try. “I remember how surprised I was, when you first moved here, after Rachel, that you'd never been fishing.” When Jess only nods, Renny adds, “You were just a young teenager, of course, but I suppose I had thought Ray or Rachel had taken you. You lived right by that lake!”

Jess chews on a piece of hay, looks up. “Nope, we never went fishing.”

“Ben loved doing that with you. After you moved here.”

“I know.”

“Ben was a good grandfather.”

“I know.”

“What was Ray or Rachel thinking, never taking two kids fishing?”

“I wish Ray wasn't getting out.” Jess says it while looking up at dust motes floating in the sunlight coming through the door. “Does stress make Alzheimer's worse? Ever since last week, Grandpa has seemed . . . worse. I wonder if Ray stresses him out.”

She says it calmly and quietly, rhetorically, and it suddenly occurs to Renny that she simply hasn't thought about how all this must feel to Jess. Not really. How it would feel to be in Jess's body. How people keep disappearing on her. How it would feel to have your mother's killer, your stepfather, free from jail? And your mother gone? And your grandfather disappearing? And would you worry that this killer-father would try to get in touch with you? Does she ever get angry at how unfair it all is? At the same time, she wonders at herself for not wondering sooner. Why don't thoughts like this occur to her naturally? Why has she not considered this before? It's like forgetting mint for Lipton tea. She wonders if some segment has always been missing from her brain. What's wrong with
her
? She will get better at this; she will try for a real conversation.