The Wonders of the Invisible World (11 page)

Which brings us, by commodious vicus of recirculation—hey, the fun never stops—to (b). So here’s the thing that happened today. Monday. No need to backtrack and give a blow-by-blow of the whole weekend: it got over with. Phone didn’t ring once. Which really isn’t a complaint. It wasn’t until late this afternoon that I finally heard from Jane.

“I’m sorry to be bothering you at work,” she said.

“What are you
talking
about,” I said. “How
are
you? What’s going on?”

She said, “I just wanted to tell you that you don’t have anything to worry about if you were worried. I got my period.”

“Thank God,” I said. I fetched a sigh, too, but got my hand over the phone in time to muffle it. “That’s really good,” I said. “I
was
worried, to tell you the truth. That would’ve been just—”

“And,” she said, “I also wanted to tell you. I don’t think I’m going to be seeing you anymore, okay? So. It’s like, I’ll probably, we’ll probably run into each other around school and everything, but I really don’t want to talk to you, like have a conversation with you. And I don’t want you to call me. Okay?”

“Look,” I said—but as I said “Look” she said “ ’Bye” and hung up. I hung up too and said “Okay” out loud. I took a deep breath and let it out. Steady now.

I looked around and there it all was: file cabinets, books on shelves, cloth wall hanging of a vulpine Elvis in white jumpsuit, a lei around his neck. Camp fun from long ago, a gift from Laura, and what it was still doing up I couldn’t imagine. Picture of Carrie, in stand-up Plexiglas, smiling with all her hurt radiance, holding a kitten whose name I knew to be Mittens. As in
What, lost your.
I took another breath, let it out. Okay. See, the temptation would be to dwell on the possibility that she was lying about her period and had taken steps on her own. For all I know, she was calling from the pay phone at some clinic. And had been counting on me to see through her bullshit in the nick of time.

I
t was the woman doctor who finally came out and told us we could go in. She said Bonnie came through the surgery fine, as far as they could tell, and not to be shocked when we saw her. We followed the doctor into the intensive care and over to a bed with an IV bag hanging over it. Bonnie lay flat on her back, in a white gown with short sleeves; they’d taped the needle end of the tubing to the back of her hand, and they had the hand strapped to the side rail in case she tried to move. But she wasn’t moving: you had to look close to see her chest rise and fall. She had another tube up her nose, the whole top of her head was wrapped in bandages and her face was so swollen that she looked the way she had as a baby.

I picked up her other hand, stroked it and held it. The hand didn’t do anything back. I said, “Daddy’s here, honey. You’re going to be fine.” Nothing.

Dave Senior wouldn’t come near the bed. Being her husband, it must’ve been even harder on him. He turned to the doctor and said, “
This
looks great. When the hell are you going to know what’s going on?”

The doctor put up a hand, like she was making to guard herself. “Not before tomorrow,” she said. “At the earliest.” She was a small woman, pretty enough, with lines at the corners of her eyes and dark circles. To me, she seemed young for a
doctor—she might’ve been forty—but for her I suppose it was a different story. I know when I was forty, I felt like an old man. Sylvia had run off to Phoenix with her boss and left it up to Bonnie either to go out there or to stay with me in Clinton. A teenage girl, with her school and all her friends? What do you imagine she’s going to choose? So I had Bonnie to look after and the house to try to keep up, all the while putting in ten, fifteen hours a week overtime so I could set something aside for her college. But that’s years and years ago now. I retired, sold the house and bought my little place up in Shelburne Falls. And Bonnie finally settled down and married Dave; they live over in Madison, not ten minutes from where we lived in Clinton. Sylvia and I will talk a couple times a year by phone, and I’ll even chat with Harold if he happens to pick up. Hell, by now they’ve been married longer than we were. She claims to have cut way back on her drinking, which I think was half her problem. And I really
am
an old man now, though Bonnie says seventy-two’s not old anymore. I don’t
feel
old these days. I’m healthy (knock wood), I keep active and I’m not strapped for money. That’s my good way of looking at it.

I left Dave in there with Bonnie and went back to the waiting room to use the pay phone. I’d managed to put off calling Sylvia for a whole day, just about. In the first place, Dave couldn’t even get hold of me until a couple hours after he got word of the accident. (I’d been over trying to get Scotty Williams’s ArcticCat running so he could put it in the paper; he hasn’t been well the last year or so.) Then the drive down delayed things another couple hours. I meant to make the call as soon as I got to the hospital, but I found out they still had some tests to do, and by the time they finished up it was after midnight. Only ten o’clock Sylvia’s time, but she would’ve been up the whole night worrying. I could’ve called this morning, but they started getting Bonnie ready at seven and I wasn’t about to wake Sylvia up out of a dead sleep at five a.m. Why
Dave Senior left it for me to pass the word to his mother-in-law is another question.

So at least now I wouldn’t be calling with all bad news, but it scared me to think what a chance I’d been taking. Imagine having to call to say Bonnie was gone—no preparation, nothing. I waited for a colored man to get done with the phone and tried not to listen—something about a transfusion. Then he went back and sat with his wife. It being a workday, we were the only ones in the waiting room. They were a nice-appearing couple, both of them starting to get some white hairs. She would look at the floor, then up at the clock. He kept hold of her hand.

Sylvia’s phone out there doesn’t ring like a regular phone; it sounds thinner and beepier. She says Harold likes to have everything modern. When she answers, she always says
Martin residence.

“Syl, this is Len,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you. Now, Bonnie’s all right, but I wanted to let you know she
is
in the hospital.”

“Oh my Christ.”

“No, now, she’s going to be fine. The doctor—what happened, apparently somebody broadsided her when she was pulling out into traffic and they had to—they operated on her this morning and the doctor says she came through it fine.”

“Oh my Christ. What are you saying?”

But all in all she took it okay; a couple more
Oh my Christs
and that was about the extent of it. She even thought to ask who was looking after Dave Junior and how Dave Senior was holding up. I said he was doing fine. The only time he’d really started carrying on—I didn’t get into this with Sylvia—was when he told me that where Bonnie was pulling out of was a motel entrance. As I told him, she was probably looking for a phone.

“You might as well sit tight for the time being,” I said. “There’s nothing much to do here at this point. Now, when they bring her home—”

“Are you crazy?” Sylvia said. “Are you out of your mind? You think there’s any way I wouldn’t be with my
daughter
?”

I could’ve said something about that. But I just said, “Well, I’ll be here. If I’m not in the waiting room, I’m either at Dave and Bonnie’s or I’m just down getting a cup of coffee.”

“I hope you’re eating,” she said.

After I got done, the colored fellow’s wife got up and made a call and came away shaking her head. They talked together for a minute, then went over to the elevators and pressed the
DOWN
button.
Ding,
and the doors slid apart to take them in. I don’t know where the rest of the afternoon went to. The TV was on, a game show and then a talk show and then what I guess was a soap opera. I’m not much of a one for TV. Books, movies—anything where you just sit. Dave and Bonnie gave me a VCR my last birthday—a nice thought—but after I watched a half a dozen movies the novelty wore off.

The window had a view of the parking lot and a loading dock, and eventually it started to get dark outside. I was looking out, watching a UPS man hand boxes out of the back of his truck, when the pink lights came on.

I talked Dave Senior out of spending the night on the waiting-room sofa, thank God, and followed him to his sister’s in North Madison to pick up Little Dave, then on to the house. When he unlocked the kitchen door, I got a smell of onion and garbage. They had dirty dishes piled up on the counter and toys all thrown around: trucks and hot rods and robots and space aliens. “You mind watching him while I try to get some of this shit squared away?” he said. “Housekeeping hasn’t exactly
been at the top of the list.” But the truth is, their house doesn’t generally look much better. Of course Bonnie goes to work, which Sylvia never did until Bonnie started seventh grade. (And we know what happened next.)

Dave Junior’s three, and the way he gets more keyed up the tireder he gets reminds me of Bonnie at that age. I settled him down and let him pick out a storybook—not knowing what I was letting myself in for. I took him on my lap, opened up the book and, lo and behold, they had pictures but no words, the idea being you had to make up your own story. I thought,
Heaven help you if you don’t tell him this thing the way his mama does.

“Look at the mouse,” I said. “He woke up the cat, see, and now look what happened, the cat’s chasing him.” It went along that while the cat’s chasing the mouse a dog starts chasing
him,
then they knock over a big cake and that gets a man chasing the three of them, and so forth and so on. I could see now that it was a house-that-Jack-built kind of idea, though it would’ve been nice if they’d let you know beforehand so you could do a better job. But the way I told it seemed to suit him, except that one time he got impatient and turned the page before I was done talking about the picture.

Dave Senior came in from the kitchen. “How you making out?”

“We’re doing fine,” I said. “I think Grampa made a hit.” I roughed up Little Dave’s hair. It’s so soft; softer, I’d say, than Bonnie’s used to be. “You’re going to see Gramma pretty soon,” I told him. “You’ll like that, I betcha. Gramma be plenty glad to see
you,
I can tell you that.”

“Do you remember Nonny?” Dave Senior said.

“Yes.” Little Dave has this way of saying his words exactly.

Dave Senior shook his head. “I would doubt he remembers. Let’s go, partner. Past your bedtime.”

I did this and that in the living room, piling up magazines, getting all the toys in one place. But the whole time I kept thinking,
If only.
You know, if only she hadn’t stopped off there. If only she would’ve just pulled out five seconds later, or five seconds earlier. A good way to drive yourself crazy. You imagine all the things that could make five seconds’ difference: fishing around for car keys, fiddling with your seat belt. Or, if she did stop off to call somebody, the phone ringing once or twice more. I could picture her turning the rearview mirror to fix her hair for a second, then taking another couple seconds to get the mirror back right. But what in the world was she doing out that way in the first place? Her supervisor told Dave Senior she went home sick—a turkey sandwich that didn’t agree with her. She wasn’t heading straight home, though, because where it happened was on the Post Road, almost over into Westbrook. She probably had an errand of some sort, then stopped off to make a phone call; motels generally have a pay phone outside the office.

I was trying to find where they kept their vacuum when Dave Senior came in and said he’d changed his mind and was going to take a shower and head back to the hospital. So I did my little song and dance again. The best way he could help Bonnie was to keep his own strength up, and so forth and so on. I told him, “She’s not going to know you’re out there, Dave. For all she knows right now, you could be on the planet Mars.” Although I personally believe people
do
know. You hear of too many cases where they wake up and they can tell you what everybody said. But what was more important? Her maybe having that little extra boost now, or him being able to hold himself together over the next who knows how long?

I asked if he wanted the TV. He said he didn’t care, but it didn’t take him any time at all to get involved in some hospital program—not what I would’ve picked to get my mind off
things—where a bad girl seemed to be making a play for a married doctor. So that when the phone rang he jumped a foot. He listened for a second, then said, “Hang on, I’ll let you talk to Len,” and held out the phone to me. It was Sylvia, calling from the airport out there. She couldn’t find a nonstop to either New York or Boston, so she was about to get on a plane for Atlanta, where she’d put up overnight and fly to New York in the morning and then hire a rental car. I hated to think what all this was going to set old Harold back.

“Be careful driving,” I said. “Just take your time.”

“Hah,” she said. “You’d just as soon I didn’t come at all. You think I won’t be on good behavior.”

“That’s not so,” I said.

“Hah. You never were much of a liar.”

I could’ve said something about that, too.

When the commercials came on, Dave Senior looked over. “I get you a cold one, Pop? I could sure as hell use one.”

“Guess you could twist my arm,” I said. I was glad he felt like he could call me Pop. His own father died years ago; from what I can gather, he was hell on wheels when he drank. They say it’s one in ten; seems like about one in two sometimes.

We cracked our beers and I got him talking about Little Dave and what he could and couldn’t do—lately he was trying to learn to tie his shoes—until the hospital program came back on. I remember when Bonnie was about four, she used to tie her shoes with a special knot she made up herself, and you had a hell of a time undoing it. I’m ashamed now to think back, because I sometimes lost my patience. Not knowing that afterward the time would seem so short. On the TV, the bad girl tossed her head to get her hair out of her face, then clinked her glass with the married doctor.