Same with my engagement ring and my ivory cameo, which are the other two pieces I keep in that dish.”
Lois gave Ralph an intense, pleading look. He squeezed her hand again.
She smiled and took a deep breath. “This is very hard for me.”
“If you want to stop-”
“No, I want to finish… except that, past a certain point, I can’t remember what happened, anyway. It was all so horrible. You see, Janet said she knew where I kept them, but they weren’t there. My engagement ring was, and the cameo, but not my Christmas earrings. I went in to check myself, and she was right. We turned the place upside down, looked everywhere, but we didn’t find them. They’re gone.”
Lois was now gripping Ralph’s hands in both of her own, and seemed to be talking mostly to the zipper of his jacket.
“We took all the clothes out of the bureau… Harold pulled the bureau itself out from the wall and looked behind it… under the bed and the sofa cushions… and it seemed like every time I
looked at Janet, she was looking back at me, giving me that sweet, wide-eyed look of hers. Sweet as melting butter, it is-except in the eyes, anyway-and she didn’t have to come right out and say what she was thinking, because I already knew. ’You see? You see how right Dr. Litchfield was to call us, and how right we were to make that appointment? And how pigheaded you’re being? Because you need to be in a place like Riverview Estates, and this just proves it. You’ve lost the lovely earrings we gave you for Christmas, you’re having a serious decline in cognition, and this just proves it. It won’t be long before you’re leaving the stove-burners on… or the bathroom heater…”
“She began to cry again, and these tears made Ralph’s heart hurt. They were the deep, scouring sobs of someone who has been shamed to the deepest level of her being. Lois hid her face against his jacket.
He tightened his arm around her. Lois, he thought. Our Lois.
But no; he didn’t like the sound of that anymore, if he ever had.
My Lois, he thought, and at that instant, as if some greater power had approved, the day began to fill with light again. Sounds took on a new resonance. He looked down at his hands and Lois’s, entwined on her lap, and saw a lovely blue-gray nimbus around them, the color of cigarette smoke, The auras had returned.
“You should have sent them away the minute you realized the earrings were gone,” he heard himself say, and each word was separate and gorgeously unique, like a crystal thunderclap. “The very second.”
“Oh, I know that now,” Lois said. “She was just waiting for me to stick my foot in my mouth, and of course I obliged. But I was so upset-first the argument about whether or not I was going to Bangor i Ri with them to look at verview Estates, then hearing my doctor had told them things he had no right to tell them, and on top of all that, finding out I’d lost one of my most treasured possessions. And do you know what the cherry on top was? Having her be the one to discover those earrings were gone! Do you blame me for not knowing what to do?”
“No,” he said, and lifted her gloved hands to his mouth. The sound of them passing through the air was like the hoarse whisper of a palm sliding down a wool blanket, and for a moment he clearly saw the shape of his lips on the back of her right glove, printed there in a blue kiss.
Lois smiled. “Thank you, Ralph.”
“Welcome.”
“I suppose you have a pretty good idea of how things turned out, don’t you? Jan said, ’You really should take better care, Mother Lois, only Dr. Litchfield says you’ve come to a time of life when you really can’t take better care, and that’s why we’ve been thinking about Riverview Estates. I’m sorry we ruffled your feathers, but it seemed important to move quickly. Now you see why.”
“Ralph looked up.
Overhead, the sky was a cataract of green-blue fire filled with clouds that looked like chrome airboats. He looked down the hill and saw Rosalie still lying between the Portosans. The dark gray balloon-string rose from her snout, wavering in the cool October breeze.
“I got really mad, then-” She broke off and smiled. Ralph thought it was the first smile he’d seen from her today which expressed real humor instead of some less pleasant and more complicated emotion.
“No-that’s not right. I did more than just get mad.
If my great-nephew had been there, he would have said ’Nana went nuclear.”
“Ralph laughed and Lois laughed with him, but her half sounded a trifle forced.
“What galls me is that Janet knew I would,” she said. “She wanied me to go nuclear, I think, because she knew how guilty I’d feel later on. And God knows I do. I screamed at them to get the hell out.
Harold looked like he wanted to sink right through the floorboards-shouting has always made him so embarrassed-but Jan just sat there with her hands folded in her lap, smiling and actually nodding her head, as if to say ’That’s right, Mother Lois, you go on and get all that nasty old poison out of your system, and when it’s gone, maybe you’ll be ready to hear sense.” Lois took a deep breath.
“Then something happened. I’m not sure just what. This wasn’t the first time, either, but it was the worst time. I’m afraid it was some kind of… well… some kind of seizure. Anyway, I started to see Janet in a really funny way… a really scary way. And I said something that finally got to her. I can’t remember what it was, and I’m not sure I want to know, but it certainly wiped that sweetysweety-sweet smile I hate so much off her face. In fact, she just about dragged Harold out. The last thing I remember her saying is that one of them would call me when I wasn’t so hysterical that I couldn’t help making ugly accusations about the people who loved me.
“I stayed in my house for a little while after they were gone, and then I came out to sit in the park. Sometimes just sitting in the sun makes a body feel better. I stopped in the Red Apple for a snack and that’s when I heard you and Bill had a fight. Are you and he’ really on the outs, do you think?”
Ralph shook his head. “Nah-we’ll make it up. I really like Bill, but-”
ri
“-but you have to be careful what you say with him,” she rushed.
“Also, Ralph, may I add that you can’t take what he says back to YOu too seriously?”
This time it was Ralph who gave their linked hands a squeeze.
“That might be good advice for you, too, Lois-you shouldn’t take what happened this morning too seriously.”
She sighed. “Maybe, but it’s hard not to. I said some terrible things at the end, Ralph. Terrible. That awful smile of hers…”
A rainbow of understanding suddenly lit Ralph’s consciousness.
In its glow he saw a very large thing, so large it seemed both unquestionable and preordained. He fully faced Lois for the first time since the auras had returned to him… or since he had returned to them. She sat in a capsule of translucent gray light as bright as fog on a summer morning which is about to turn sunny. It transformed the woman Bill McGovern called “Our Lois” into a creature of great dignity… and almost unbearable beauty.
She looks like Eos, he thought. Goddess of the dawn.
Lois stirred uneasily on the bench. “Ralph? Why are you looking at me that way?”
Because you’re beautiful, and because I’ve fallen in love with you, Ralph thought, amazed. Right now I’m so in love with you that I feel as if I’m drowning, and the dying’s fine.
“Because you remember exactly what you said.”
She began to play nervously with the clasp of her purse again.
“No, I-”
“Yes you do. You told your daughter-in-law that she took your earrings. She did it because she realized you were going to stick to your guns about not going with them, and not getting what she wants makes your daughter-in-law crazy… it makes her go nuclear. She did it because you pissed her off. Isn’t that about the size of it?”