She is back at the picture of the seashore. Julia’s voice rises up: Someone taught this Thomas Eddington person that rocks look like this and the ocean looks like that and that it’s especially arty if you make it a wee bit unrealistic with some pink dashes in the water and yellow on the rocks …
Enough, Lore interrupts wearily. Again she spreads a hand on her belly. Defiantly, she celebrates the little flecks of humanity going about their business, the winsome sailboat, the melodramatically fading sun. She mentally deposits Thomas Eddington, 1993, in a large, disorderly room — a wooden shed on an old Vermont property, a cold wind coming in through the slats, the floor covered in drop cloths, meticulously dabbing on his colors of boats and sea, of sunbathers, of summer. He is pleased to be making summer during the winter. He is making summer as best he knows how. And that is honorable and fine, thinks Lore. (The nurse mysteriously changes direction, passes Lore again. That scent of chocolate: sludgy, sour.) It’s a good picture after all, she decides. She doesn’t care what Julia thinks, or Julia’s mother, or the director of the fucking Metropolitan Museum. It has pleasant colors and evokes sensations of quiet, pleasant, lazy days. It reminds her — and strangely, memory slips in without a feeling of counterpressure, without distress — of summer days spent at the beach with Julia and Asa, or with Julia if Asa couldn’t come, of the fierce heat against her face and the gulls trying to pick at the sandwiches they’d packed, and the cold waves bringing you back to life after you had baked yourself to a sweat. She was a poor swimmer, and Asa worked with her in the water, showing her how to coordinate her kicking and her breath. Julia called from the beach: “You can do it! Go! Go!” Lore was ashamed to be clumsy at something so rudimentary, something most children mastered by the time they were seven. But she slowly improved, and one Sunday Asa, in reward, bought her a boogie board and showed her how to use it. She swallowed salt water at first, and was slammed upside down on the beach more than once, but now she knew what to do when she went under and she didn’t panic, just held her breath and waited for the world to right itself. Soon she got hooked on riding the waves, slick-feeling and fast under the board. Treading water and waiting for the biggest crests, jumping, feeling the triumph of having timed things just right, of being scooped up in the palm of the wave and enabled to fly. Next to her, on a different board, rode Asa or Julia, taking turns, allowing her to hog the new toy. Sometimes they shouted to her as they rode—“It’s a good one!” or “Look at you, Supergirl!”—but Lore was too delighted to answer. Those seconds of speeding toward the shallows in a tunnel of rushing sound forged a solitude that was perfect and somehow sacred. At last she climbed with quivering legs onto the sand and threw herself back into her beach chair, spent. It seemed a great dream, to lie on the edge of a continent, looking out upon sun-dazzled, horizonless water. She expanded, stretched deep inside of herself, felt herself become pliable, capable of great acts of the heart. She might be more beautiful than she had imagined. She might be a heroine of some sort. She teased herself over these exaggerated notions but let them come and fill her with secret happiness.
Ahead, a burst of sound from an open room. A doctor — short, a little roundish, with dark hair, Indian perhaps, stands over a patient in a reclining chair, slightly smiling, but the patient, both of whose legs end at the knees, knees swaddled in thick white bandages, is laughing uproariously. And now mirth catches at the corners of the doctor’s smile, and the smile breaks beneath it and the doctor begins to laugh, too, shoving his hands into the pockets of his white jacket, his body vibrating up and down. Hoo-hoo! the legless man laughs, a deep bass sound, and the doctor rumbles back chuga chuga chuga! his body trembling, and they go on trading their sounds back and forth, the doctor raising his right hand as if conducting the small orchestra they are making. The bubbles of this shared laughter enter Lore and make her shake a little too, smile and vibrate, as she passes, so that she conceals herself for a moment just past the door, trying to see in, trying to imbibe the effervescence a little longer.
As she comes in sight of the charge desk, Marina, the charge nurse, looks up at her grimly. “Ms. Tannenbaum!” she says loudly. “I’ve had two nurses looking for you. You are not allowed to …” Lore ignores her, entering room 7 and shutting the door. She stares out into the night pricked with street and car lights. Franckline arrives at the room a couple of minutes later, out of breath, her eyes reproachful. “I’m sorry,” blurts Lore. How she hates that phrase! It’s like trying to move sand around in her mouth. But she cannot bear Franckline looking at her like that.
“I needed …” She tries to explain, but falls silent. She doesn’t know what she needed.
“What was I to think?” asks Franckline. “How was I to know where you were?”
“I didn’t …” What didn’t she? She didn’t think. She had been angry. It seems like silliness now. Childish.
“I need to know that you are all right at all times.”
Ah! Lore is ashamed! That you are all right. At all times. Lore has been uncooperative, ungrateful! Who else has made this offering to her—that you are all right at all times? Who else has taken this on as their duty? (She was tired. She was not thinking.)
She lets Franckline guide her onto the bed.
Back home, Franckline reflects, they might have said that a lwa had for a short while taken hold of Lore. There were girls and young men who disappeared for days or even weeks, and would be found wandering miles from their villages, hair matted with sticks and mud, dried blood on their thighs, talking of mad experiences they had had with eagles, vultures, crows. There was nothing to do but bathe them and try to understand the message the lwa intended. Bernard chided her when she told such tales. There are no spirits except the Holy Spirit, he said. He and his family had been converted by Protestant missionaries when he was fifteen. Franckline too believed in Our One Savior, and wore the cross to show it. But even here, 1,500 miles away from Ayiti, it was hard not to think that the spirits from her childhood occasionally entered other bodies and made themselves known.
When she’d come out into the empty labor room and had not found Lore in the hallways or in any of the bathrooms, she’d grown alarmed, thinking of those crow-plucked and eagle-harassed men and women, and also of the woman, a year ago last fall, too much methamphetamine still in her veins, who went up to the eleventh floor and out onto the roof and jumped. The woman had been delivered just a couple of hours earlier of a baby boy, and her nurse (Carmen Ingres, it was, poor Carmen) had left her resting, so she thought, with her boyfriend. When Carmen next poked her head in to check on things, the boyfriend was gone, disappeared into the dusk, and the woman had flung herself onto Sixth Avenue.