She nods. He gets hunched down and holds out his hand to Alisa and Alex. She sees he’s sweating and although he looks kind of shaky and pretty grubby, she starts to think maybe he needs to eat, or rest. That’s the first thing that occurs to her. And before she can think about it too much, Alex pushes in front of her legs.
“Hey, do you wanna come to my birthday party?” he says to Michael. Lisa smiles, and Michael nods seriously.
“Well, when is your birthday?” Michael asks Alex.
“Today, I think, Mom,” Alex says, looking at his mother and nodding.
“About three months from now,” Lisa says. She watches Alex watch Michael, his small body leaning forward, his hands balled into fists of excitement. Of course they want to see other people. Faintly, somewhere behind that, she feels something else. About herself. The only adult she’s spoken to in days is the woman at the supermarket.
“Do you mind if I get a glass of water?” Michael says the words, then Lisa nods. She stands there nodding and there is a pause and then she opens the door. Is it desperation or optimism that makes people take risks, or start to long for things?
“I’ll get the water,” Lisa says. “Have a seat.” Michael sits on the couch. He is sweating and he smiles weakly at her. He holds his head for a second, then looks around Lorene’s living room. Alex and Alisa are standing by the arm of the couch, staring at the man their mother has led into the living room. Lisa looks at them for a moment, then leaves them and goes into the kitchen. She gets the filtered water out of the refrigerator and fills a glass with ice. Ice also made from filtered water. Good, clean, pure water. The ice cracks when she fills the glass, and she decides to get some cookies out and put them on a smallplate. This is something she is really good at, taking care of people, and she likes doing it. She feels most like herself doing it, she is aware of this, also.
Lisa pushes open the kitchen door with her shoulder, balancing the glass of water and the dish of cookies in each hand. Michael leans against the arm of the couch. His eyes are closed and he is breathing heavily. Lisa puts the glass and dish down.
“Hey, what’s wrong with him?”
“He’s sleeping, honey.” Lisa sits on a chair across from the couch.
“Why?”
“He’s tired, I guess. Now be quiet.” Lisa reaches for a cookie, eating slowly as Michael sleeps. His hands have fallen away from his lap. Lisa notices he has many circle scars, maybe burns, on the tender skin on the underside of his upper arm. Over and over.
Lorene walks through New Orleans, she inhales the city. Its strangeness. The oldness and decay relieve her of things. She thinks about finding someone to talk to. Or not. She spends all day in a cafe reading a nineteenth-century novel she found in a secondhand store. How exhausted she feels, how she just wants to sit and do nothing. She watches the slightly worn-out city, the way it encourages her to do nothing, and she thinks she could stay awhile. “I think I’m falling in love,” she says, in a postcard, which she plans to mail to Mina tomorrow. But when she gets up from the table, she leaves the card behind, already tired of the sentiment.
Mina wakes up on the couch at her mother’s. She thinks she’ll call David. Tell him she’s coming back. Well, what else is thereto do? She gets up and drinks coffee alone. She decides to take a walk through the park. It’s early, but already the place is full of determined runners and people walking their dogs. She hasn’t been in Central Park since she visited Michael at Columbia. Mina walks all the way to 116th Street, and over to the Columbia campus. It feels so long ago, another lifetime that she was here, the most desperate time in her life, worse even than right now. She had made herself forget how awful it felt, how lost she was. And it seems as she crosses the campus that she is able to remember it all for the first time, with nothing internal fixing it up. She actually has to walk here, on these streets.
A toothless man half-heartedly holds out a cup to her. She hands him a dollar.
She never fails to give money to vagrants and street people. Homeless people, bums, crazy people, damaged people. She stops no matter what and gives them something. She knows why she does this, why she gives them money: not out of sympathy for their suffering, not even out of pity, but as a talisman against them.
In the midst of the very worst year, the year her parents finally divorced, the year her fascination with not eating had quietly saturated every part of her existence, in the year of her deepest self-loathing, Mina called her brother at school. She had to escape. Although it was in the middle of midterm exams, he immediately insisted she get on the next plane to see him. He did this, insisted, at a time when surely he was barely holding it together. He’d already had one serious episode, perhaps even been hospitalized for a stint. She didn’t know at the time. She was mostly thinking about her own troubles. She did not want him to see her because she was so ashamed of whatshe was, but he insisted, as he always did. When she arrived at his dorm in Johnson Hall, when she finally saw him, all her rules collapsed. He was there at the door, smiling and handsome. Somehow the strangers they had become to each other had retreated. He was old Michael again, or at least puttting on a good show of it. And it made her normal and OK, her old self, or at least a good show of it. They spent one great afternoon walking around the campus, not saying much, but feeling playful and happy. He took her to the large and unfinished cathedral only blocks from his dorm. “Cathedrals are nice places,” he said, with no irony and no smirking. It had never occurred to him to go inside before. They felt hushed and humbled at the entrance. The light filtered through huge stained-glass panels. Mina was glad for the light and glad simply for those words,stained glass,words that seemed as mysterious and pleasing as the colored light itself, describing glass built to be shone through, designed to make something beautiful— sunlight — even more perfect, which seemed both full of hubris and nearly brilliant to her, not ethereal but human and touching. This was even more the case when she examined the figures portrayed in the stained glass — skiers and soccer players.
Mina sits on a bench by the cathedral.
So what if it ended there? Couldn’t that be the way it went? But there was more, and Mina couldn’t stop thinking of it now. The relentlessness of memory — she wanted to remember slowly and accurately, not mess the order, so she could find her way to thinking about it.
He left school later that semester, just missing his graduation. There was an incident of some kind — why didn’t she know exactly? He tried to return the next year but went back into the hospital. To stay for a long time. He wanted to. Yes, that’s it,that’s what she was trying to remember. This part. He never asked her to visit. But he wouldn’t have to, would he? Finally, after six weeks she did go. He looked so awful, gray-skinned and with those burns under his bathrobe. He was blank and silent. He smoked cigarettes and stared through her. The place was painted that green-yellow hospital color. The vague urine scent in the room, overlaid with peroxide and ammonia. And did she grab Michael and kiss him and hold his hand? Did she visit him again and try to bring him around? Did she tell him it would be all right? Did she ever even once write him back? It was unbearable for her to see him like this, this wasn’t her brother. What the fuck are all these cigarette burns? Mina wanted to scream. Why do you suck your cigarette like that? But she said nothing. It was part of the distance she had with him, had to have. Because she really didn’t want to know. After that one time, she never visited him in the hospital, no matter how often he asked. She was busy. She’d see him when he got out. It was better for him. She would just upset him. She was so busy. She simply refused to see him this way. And somehow, after enough time, the estrangement became ordinary and everyday. Eventually it became something she didn’t think about, pushed back into a secret compartment of her life.