Nine Island (17 page)

So there seems to be no damage, said the doctor. Just the previous problem with balance.

My mother looked bright. So I can go, she said. I can go home?

We'll see, he said. First let's see how well you get around on your own.

I thought, Could it
be
?

She got herself more or less attached to a walker, but couldn't fully rise and tumbled back on the bed. Second try she made two steps but then began sinking until she was caught.

Right, he said. Nope. We can't release you to live alone.

She stared at him a moment and then threw back her head.

I suppose the gods have spoken! she cried.

Are there options? he asked me. Resources? Assisted living
possible—?

Rehab first, then Sunrise. Two weeks to get things in order.

Oh, she said, flinging up her hands. Just sell everything. I don't want anything. Only my books and birds.

Photo albums?

No, no, she said. Who cares about
them
. I don't want the past.

In the grocery store then, not in an aisle for pet goods or babies, but one for adults, I looked for pull-ups, small.

Back at rehab, helped her stand from the toilet, then coaxed up the pull-ups as she clutched my arms. I looked at her wobbling bare legs.

There you are, I said, making sure the pull-ups were snug on her hips, feeling Buster's skinny shanks.

When I'd cleaned her house, boxed up her books and clothes and her carved hoopoes, anhingas, and cockatoos, then filled out the forms for Sunrise and signed on with a realtor, I went to Bayridge rehab to say good-bye. She was curled like a shrimp in her bed, a thin arm over her eyes. The AC was too strong, sheer curtain blowing between her and a huge woman in the next bed snoring at a loud TV, a tattooed junkie rolling around in the hall. I shut the door, turned everything off, opened the window to summer air, sat on the bed, stroked her arm. And wondered where she was wandering in her mind, and whether the passages were getting more narrow, like veins.

She turned, opened an eye, and sighed.

Ah, well, she said. I suppose it's time.

Yep. Got a cat and a duck that need me.

And Ovid.

Sure.

We went over all the things that would be happening now, and after a while she put her hand on mine.

You know, she said, I don't think I meant what I told you. About how you should give up on all that, be alone.

Well, you know I never listen to you anyway, I said.

Because what will happen, she said, when you're like me, when this time comes, and you don't have someone like you?

Flying back to Miami that night, I stared at the thin line of light edging the coast from the blackness of ocean.

Then it was our turn to swing west and fly over the Venetians, and how beautiful they were, circles of light on the dark bay, small islands knee-deep in the sea.

Insula
was island, for Ovid.

Later turned into
isola
.

Insulation, isolation.

Am wondering if they're really alike.

Walking down the long passages of Miami International, I couldn't stop staring at the gorgeous floor: terrazzo inset with tiny brass figures of plankton, sea fans, corals, algae, gastropods, urchins—tiny brass cells of life. Then the hallway reached a huge hub to other halls, so I looked up to find my way. Then down again to find a different floor. No tiny brass plankton inset in this terrazzo; instead, an enormous single pattern. A whorl of black and gray and white marble chips that spun and spun around a central eye: a hurricane of stone.

A
ND SHE'S RIGHT, my mother. N and K, too. Because I do remember moments, warm, voluptuous moments, what it could be like. One morning, when I was showered and warm and somehow feeling both porous and whole, in he came, into the room with its tall window of live oaks making the light green, the polished wood warm beneath my bare feet. The door clicked shut, and his sudden mouth on my neck felt river-fresh, my panties only just pulled on now slipped off by his fingers as I leaned back on the bed and sighed, my arms stretched over the cotton blanket, as what felt new and morning-clean slid inside to a place that was still blurred with sleep but waking so quickly, suddenly so full of quickness and light and pleasure, pleasure, until each of us was laughing in the other's laughing mouth. A morning like that, who wouldn't laugh with delight when it's wonderful and already done before you even knew you were longing?

Soft skin alive near your own, skin so close it isn't substance but pure human warmth. So close you can't imagine aloneness.

And I miss this. I miss it.

F
IRST DAY BACK at the Love Boat was the last day of the pool, and when I went down this morning, the hourglass was full of old swimmers, dismay. The lady with iron hair walked her grim circles in the shallow end; Fran's pink cap barged along the pool's rim, until she bumped into a carbuncled man leaning on the lip, his eyes shut and arms outstretched, old legs swaying in her path. I didn't swim, just lay on a lounge chair looking at words or up at the sky, and let the old swimmers have the pool.

After feeding the duck this evening, walked along the dock, past
Tango
,
All In!
and the little red ferry. Then up the spiral staircase, past the diving girl-tree, through the jungle. Flossy red bottlebrushes, alabaster beads dangling from a palm, yellow orchid blossoms on a tree whose name I've never learned. Planted near the rails to face the light-girl a last time before the pool was emptied and the jungle razed was the old man I've unkindly called the Mummy. His sculpted face, fine white hair combed neatly back, wheelchair fitted with tubes, blue-scrubbed attendant at either side, his eyes behind sunglasses, mouth ajar. One of the attendants rose when I passed, to dab the corners of his mouth, but the old man stared unseeing at the dancing light-girl as she threw her hair and swung her hips way across the bay.

Behind him, alone in the last hour of the hourglass pool, was N. In the evening light and the water's cool blue, her thin body seemed pale wax. She floated. Her eyes were shut, hair in wet tendrils, cheeks drawn, all long nose. She floated, still, suspended in blue. Then she gathered from her center, spread slim arms and legs, and began to swim. She swam parabolas and loops, ellipses and arcs, she swam a silent tale that seemed to tell who she was when still herself, which she would always and only be when she was in water.

Upstairs, I called my mother, Buster languorous on the sofa beside me, one paw draped over my leg.

You know, she said, I don't care how it looks, these old legs and arms and this ugly old wheelchair. It doesn't matter. Because
really
I'm still nineteen. Inside.

Nineteen somewhere deep inside, in the dark living pith at the core. Ovid's girls, the breathing trees.

Across the way, only one balcony of Costa Brava is lit, the corner of the seventeenth floor. Sitting there as in a niche of a shadowy church is the young woman with origami. Cross-legged, she works on pieces of colored paper, folding, gluing, cutting. Around her grows a nest of color.

F
IRST THE CONTRACTORS taped orange
danger
signs to the glass doors on the mezzanine and the top of the spiral steps. When everyone defied the signs, they added strips of
do not cross
tape; finally they padlocked the doors and hung chains. They began draining the pool: sump pumps sucked water into big black rubber hoses that snaked over the balustrade down to the dock and spewed out to the bay. Then they buzz-sawed the jungle—palms, bottlebrushes, mahoganies, gumbo-limbos, screw pines crashing down. The smaller things they bulldozed, the philodendra, button trees, sweet olives, and others whose names I don't know, with flagrant yellow blossoms.

Let us take the small ones and put them in pots! cried people at a meeting. The lady upstairs was one.

Not cost-effective, said the contractor's spokesman. Don't worry. We'll plant new.

But that will take years!

And we are old.

It took three days to raze the jungle and drain the pool. No hourglass of clear blue, no tropical shadow, nothing but muddy concrete in raw sun. They left just one strip of the jungle standing, near the spiral steps, twenty-two stories below N and P.

S
INCE THEN, IT'S rained. It rains every day.

No swimming, no walking. Just pacing inside the long vegetal halls.

Today the weather is deepening. The sky lowers, troubled, dense and gray, the air hot and tense. Tropical storm, everyone says. You can tell something's coming not just because of the sky but because men at Costa Brava are piling up lounge chairs and carting them inside. Up and down the building, plants and patio chairs are dragged in, hurricane shutters clattering shut.

But nothing's really happening yet, just that roiling sky, the water of the bay lead-dull and choppy, the few sailboats out there seesawing. No rain now. And after four pages of O I have got to get out of here and walk, hard and fast.

Of course I was out there when it hit, and when it did, it was wild. First a tingle in the air, a yellowish light as if from the ground, then a pull upward, a whoosh, and suddenly rain slashed down. Was on San Marino, three islands away, and the rain fell so hard, no point to my pink umbrella. Walked fast, then started to jog, and by the time I reached the next green verge, water bubbled up from the drains. By Di Lido it gushed down the gutters, and soon it sheeted over the street. By Rivo Alto it flowed up to my ankles, clothes dripping, water sliding into my eyes, my feet slipping out of the FitFlops, so took them off, to hell with glass. Tried really to run but the water rushed at my shins, and at the verge by the drawbridge, waves broke on the grass. The duck! She huddled in her sea grape, the shrub leaning, leaves tearing off and spinning into the wind. Nothing to do: I ran past. Waves rolled and crashed below the bridge, water spraying through the grate. Was over the bridge and over the verge and rounding the corner, struggling to move through flowing water, cars stalled everywhere, people in them looking stunned or climbing out, staggering through surf like me.

Up ahead on the ramp to the front entry was Virgil, tie in the wind, trying to get a white-coiffed lady inside.

Faster to come in through the garage, where water spewed from the drain holes, gushed through the rebar skeleton of the pool, rivered over the concrete floor. Got in the elevator and rose to my floor, and when I'd run squelching down the hall, opened my door in time to see the green table skidding over the porch—so wrenched the sliding doors open to the roaring wild and pulled in the table and chair that had already slammed against the wall. Got the glass doors shut and locked, water on the cork as far as the couch, and could see almost nothing beyond the balustrade, only gray blur, streaming, leaves and trash whipping by. And so loud, a roaring and shrieking, glass vibrating violently. I found Buster, held him tight, went into the closet, shut the door.

We sat there, curved together in the dark. Buster shivered, feeling the thunder and howling wind even if he couldn't hear them. I stroked his small head and the slender gully between his shoulders and held him nestled in my lap, his once clear eyes staring blind at the dark, his diaper loose, hind legs trembling. We rocked in the dark as the wind screamed and rain roared, his pin-claws kneading my shoulder, whiskers at my cheek.

I will always love you
,
no matter what
, my husband whispered one night near the end, before we finally gave up.

• • •

And maybe that's enough. To have had some love some time. Even if it worked only awhile. It's enough to have had some once and now to live with just pieces of it, and it's all right if you spend what you still have on an old cat or duck, a few friends, your mother. Not everyone is paired on the ark.

W
HEN I GOT up this morning and went into the study, I knew even before opening the door. A stillness.

Buster lay on the cork, thin black paws crossed. I stroked his head; the silky fur was cool. Sank my hands and face in his soft belly. Knelt there awhile.

After a time, called N.

Oh, no, I'm sorry, she said. I'm so sorry. She sounded like she was about to cry, too, large gray eyes going liquid.

At least I didn't do it, I said. Should I have?

No, she said, her voice firm. He was home. With you. No.

She told me to come up and have a drink.

When you feel like it, she said. How about six? I'm not feeling so hot myself, to tell the truth, but a drink would be nice.

Laid Buster in his nest. Decided he could stay there today.

Seemed best only to read, today. Look at the water, the sky.

W
HEN I WENT up to N's place, she looked like I'd caught her at something, her eyes wild above that stalk of neck.

No, it's okay, she said. Come on, let's have some wine. Or maybe a martini. I could use a martini. But I'll get you wine.

We sat on the balcony, looking down at the ruined jungle, cratered pool, islands, and distant city, talking about the last days of pets, and something faltered in her voice.

No no, she said, I'm sorry. It's the same stupid thing, it's just this
pain
I can't get rid of, even after the last procedure, I didn't even tell you about it, I'm a big fool to have done it, and this isn't me, I wish you didn't know me like this, really I used to be a lot of fun—and her eyes were filling, her flossy head quavering on that neck, but just then there was a noise from inside the apartment.

Oh. That's P, she said. He likes to let me spend myself for a time on people, and when I get to a certain point, he'll come out and change the subject. Right, P? There you are.

P stepped out onto the porch with a bottle and glass. He looked fixedly at N, then turned to me. It seemed like a good time to join you, he said.