Page 28

CHAPTER 27

August 24 th

11:11 AM

“I UNDERSTAND YOUR frustration, ma’am, but we’ve been asked to limit Mr. Crawford’s visitors to only his son for the time being.”

The horse-faced nurse behind the desk engrosses herself in paperwork to avoid eye contact, as if I will disappear if she ignores me long enough. I set down the bouquet of pink and white stargazer lilies I brought for Gil. I went to three different florists before I finally found them, then shelled out fifty dollars for a dozen limp flowers and a cheap vase for them to wither in. “These are his favorite flowers,” I say.

“I’m really sorry.”

“I’m never going to see him again. I brought him flowers.”

She simpers and tilts her head, looking just past me. “And that’s very thoughtful of you, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do. I don’t make the rules, unfortunately. That’s what I like to call above my pay grade.”

“How much money will make you look the other way?”

This gets her attention. She draws a hand to her chest and gasps like I’ve suggested we infiltrate the Louvre and steal the Mona Lisa . “I’m insulted you would even—”

“Everything okay here?” Penny joins the nurse behind the desk, standing close behind her, hands cupped over the nurse’s broad shoulders. The gesture is too intimate to be platonic. The horse-faced nurse unclenches at her touch, and when Penny’s hands push aside the fabric of her scrub top to massage her bare shoulder, she doesn’t recoil. This woman has probably met Josiah, shaken his hand, eaten dinner at his table, held Penny’s hand and kissed her cheek in front of him.

Penny smiles at the bouquet. “Beautiful, flowers, Providence. Stargazer lilies?”

The horse-faced nurse rolls her shoulders until they pop. “I’m trying to explain, politely , that Gil Crawford can’t have visitors other than his son.”

“Did something happen?”

“I’m going off the notes in his chart.”

“I’m leaving town soon,” I say to Penny as she reads the computer screen through squinted eyes. “I’m probably never coming back, so I wanted to say goodbye.”

Penny strokes a petal with her thumb, then brings it to her nose and breathes in the scent left behind. “It’s probably a precaution from the concussion,” she says “You know how Dr. Bart is. Gil’s doing great.”

It probably has nothing to do with the concussion and everything to do with me telling Connor to drop dead. If he was willing to cover up my mother’s death to protect his father, he wouldn’t bat an eye to blackball me from the nursing home. “Connor mentioned the concussion,” I say. “It sounded pretty minor.”

“They happen a lot here,” the nurse says.

“Slips and falls every day of the week,” Penny adds, turning to her colleague. “I don’t see the harm. He’s been lonely the last couple days, anyhow.”

She shrugs again. “You’re the one who’ll get yelled at.”

Her smile still plastered on, Penny hands me the bouquet and leads me down the hall. She leans close to me like a high schooler with a titillating piece of gossip to share. “Not like they can fire me. We’re four nurses short as it is.”

We avoid a wet-floor sign and the janitor mopping up a yellow puddle. The door to every room is open, allowing the competing cacophonies of their television channels to spill into the hallway—radical right-wing news channels, gunfire from old western movies, has-been celebrities shilling reverse mortgages. There is no bingo in the common room today. The French doors are fastened shut by a bungee cord around the handles, a handwritten sign taped to the door asking residents to join them for a gin rummy tournament at seven.

“Has Connor been back to visit since his fall?”

Penny’s cheerleader ponytail whips the back of my neck when she shakes her head. “He’s busy. He comes as much as he can.”

“If Gil was my dad, I’d be here every day.”

“You wouldn’t,” she says. “This place sucks the life out of you. You go in and the person you love can’t even remember your name. It’s painful. I don’t blame people who can’t handle it more than once or twice a year.”

Chastened, I hold the flowers tighter against my chest.

Penny announces our arrival in a singsong voice. “Mr. Crawford, look who came to see you!” She ushers me through the doorframe in a dramatic sweeping motion, as if she’s welcoming me onstage for a game show. The gesture strikes me first as childish, but when I see the tenderness in her face, I realize this is the bright spot in her day of feeding people who cannot feed themselves and cleaning people who cannot clean themselves.

Gil is too engrossed in setting up his chessboard to greet us. He wears a gauzy bandage above his temple, the top edge of which has unpeeled from his skin and flopped over like a dog’s ear. I start to bring him the flowers, but Penny gestures to the dresser. I make as much noise as possible, clearing my throat and shuffling my feet, but Gil never looks up, and the stargazer lilies are thus sentenced to a short, sunless life.

“Maybe your friend could join you for a game of chess, hmm?”

My name is on the tip of his tongue. I will him to say it and I will him to never speak it again, to find peace in its clumsy syllables and to turn to stone as soon as they pass his lips. He sputters, stuck on the first syllable. Prov—Prov— and every word he could make pours through my mind. Providence. Provide. Provoke. Proverbs. Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit.

And then it comes, “Providence,” just as splintered as the man before me. My lungs ache like a giant fist is squeezing out all their air, my ribs caving in on my heart.

Penny guides me to the chair across from Gil and spins the chessboard. “Maybe you can be white, Providence,” she says. “White goes first, doesn’t it?”

“That sounds good to me,” Gil says.

As she leaves, Penny turns on the radio. A staticky country station bleats at us from the corner.

“You should move this one.” Gil taps the queen’s pawn. His smile warms my face like the first ray of sun after a thunderstorm. “Got to control the center.”

I move the king’s pawn instead. “Maybe this one.”

“Remind me to teach you the Caro-Kann one of these days.”

“I already know it.”

“Who taught you?”

“You did, Mr. Crawford.”

He strokes his whiskered chin. “Bah. I’d remember if I did.”

“It was the summer with all the tornados,” I say. “You knew we didn’t have a storm cellar and you’d always wait for me to come before you closed it up.”

His laugh is empty. He knows something is wrong, something is missing, but he no longer has the faculties to identify the absence. The world is sharing a delightful joke, and he is on the outside looking in. “Between you and me, I always thought your dad was a prize idiot, not building a storm shelter all those years.”

My head snaps up at the past tense, the whisper of memory carried within. Now I see two versions of Gil. I see the Gil who hugged me on Christmas mornings, who cooked me macaroni and cheese with diced jalapenos mixed in on my birthday because it was my favorite thing for dinner, who taught me to play chess, who cheered me on at softball games when my parents were too drunk to attend—and then I see the Gil who crushed my mother’s bones, who tore the life from her body, who wept over something he knew was horrible but could not explain why. I wish I could force these two versions of Gil to fight to the death so one could prevail, and then I would know how to feel. Either I would hate him or I would love him. Nothing in between.

But there are not two versions of Gil. There is one man, one soul inhabiting the husk across the chessboard, and I love him and hate him in equal measure. The memories live on like a fruit rotted on its skin but still bright and juicy inside. In the end, this is all we have. People are only the tally of their memories.

“Can I ask you something serious, Mr. Crawford?”

He twirls a pawn between his fingers. “Shoot.”

“How come you always let me go home?”

“How do you mean?”

“The bruises. The welts. You saw them, but you always let me go home.”

He reaches for the wrong cheekbone. “Is it your face?”

By now I know it is fruitless to evoke memories. Gil’s memories are no more real than dreams, figments that disintegrate just as soon as they appear. And so, one last time, I join him in his distorted piece of reality. “He hit me with the Springfield again.”

“We should get you ice. I’ll—I’ll call Marjorie, have her get you an ice pack.”

I grab his arm as he stands. He is so frail that my fingers encircle his wrist, the carpentry calluses that once studded his palms sanded down to the sere skin of an old man. “I don’t want ice,” I say. “I just don’t want to go home.”

“You’ll stay for the night then.”

“No, Mr. Crawford. I don’t ever want to go home.”

“Oh, Providence,” he says, “I wish I could make that happen.”

A pinch in my throat. “There’s nothing stopping you from trying.”

“In a perfect world—”

“In a perfect world, my father doesn’t hit me when I make an error in a softball game.”

“You don’t deserve it,” he says.

“Why do you always let me go home?”

It dawns on me as Gil’s mouth hangs ajar that in all the years I spent at the Crawfords’ house, I never once asked this question—not aloud, not even in my own head. It was enough to have my bruises iced and my wounds bandaged, to know that no matter what pain I was in, Gil Crawford would find a way to ease it. There were always ice packs and hot soup, even arm slings and walking boots exhumed from the attic. But then I went home and it happened again. A cycle of violence enabling a cycle of love. There are only so many times a bird can have its broken wings mended before it can no longer take flight.

“I don’t want to make more trouble, not for you or your mother.” The crackle of the radio dwarfs his voice. “Keep you here, make Tom mad. Call the cops, make Tom mad. I don’t think it’s doing the right thing if I’m just putting you in more danger.”

“I’m already in danger. Every second I’m there.”

“I know.”

“You could do more for me.”

“I wish I could.”

“No, Mr. Crawford.” I clutch his hand. “You could. You could, right now. Just don’t make me go home.”

“There’s nothing I want more than a universe where you never feel pain. Not a stubbed toe, nothing.” Now it is Gil whose words tighten with tears. When he tries to castle, he knocks over a pair of his pawns. “But certain things you can’t make right.”

“But it’s the trying that matters.”

“Maybe. Maybe I’ve never tried hard enough.”

I weigh his action against his inaction, every tenderhearted letter and worn paperback he sent me in prison against all the nights I returned to Cedar Street alone. The Crawfords were just as scared of my father as everyone else in Annesville, but they laced their acts of kindness with defiance. Piecing me back together was their fuck you to him. And yes, it’s more than anyone else ever did for me, but more isn’t enough.

For most of my life, I’ve worried I am unlovable, a creature so repugnant that even my own mother never smiled at me warmly or cradled me in her arms. I thought that I was born unlovable the way some people are born deaf or blind, a simple fact of my existence. When I ran over my mother, it felt like fulfilling my birthright. Deprive me of love and I will deprive you of life. But I’m starting to understand I was not born unlovable. I grew into it because I was never given a chance to be anything else.

People love me. I am lovable.

Every time Gil sent me home, he stole another chance from me.

No, Providence. No, there’s nothing more I can do. No, my love for you has limits.

He could have sent me home ninety-nine times if only he let me stay on the hundredth.

Yes, Providence. Yes, I see you. Yes, I love you.

And Gil, I love you too, even if it was never enough.

The bones of his hands are slight like toothpicks when I squeeze them. My voice betrays me with a quiver. “Do you remember the words to ‘Lorena,’ Mr. Crawford?”

“Remember them? Ha! Marjorie’ll have them inscribed on our headstones.”

“Can you sing it for me?”

Gil chuckles. “I’ve never been much of a singer. Wait for Marjorie to get back. I’ll sound much better if she’s on the piano.”

“She won’t be home for a little while, and I have to go soon. Please, Mr. Crawford. I want to hear it before I leave.”

His smile reveals a newly missing tooth. He must have knocked it out when he fell. “You always come back.”

“I do. But let’s just think about right now, okay? Let me hear the song one more time.”

And it’s true—he isn’t much of a singer. His voice is hoarse and thin from age. But he remembers every word and every note, and his hands drum the keys of an imaginary piano. When I close my eyes, Marjorie is here, Connor too, all four of us in the living room. The open windows invite spring into the house, the air redolent with budding flowers. The carpet is blue. The stargazer lilies reach toward the sun. The chessboard is ready, and Gil plays white.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been sitting on the curb outside the nursing home, barely breathing, certainly not moving. “Lorena” resounds through my skull beginning to end. Each time I begin the song anew, I lose one more word, one more layer of the melody, until it is pared back like a church hymn.

People pass, their conversations interrupting my song, but no one dares disturb me. They assume I am grieving a loved one in the facility. In a way, I guess I am.

As I contemplate the walk to the car, my phone buzzes.

“Karishma?”

“Grace hasn’t been at school in a couple days,” she says quietly. “I don’t know if you’ve talked to her, but I haven’t heard anything, and …”

“You think she’s in trouble.”

“I do,” Karishma says. A man’s voice rumbles in the background. Mitesh, I surmise.

“I’m going to take care of it,” I assure her. “This time tomorrow, it’s all going to be over. I’ll be at his liquor store right when it opens. I’m going to end it.”

“That sounds a little … I mean, don’t do anything stupid. Like, don’t go back to prison.”

“Don’t worry about me. Grace is going to be okay. That’s all that matters.”

Karishma’s sigh crackles in my ear. I wait for her to protest again, but nothing comes. We hang up after a few moments of silence, and I lift my face to the sky, committing the warmth of the summer sun to memory.