But she can’t say anything any of those things yet, not with the complexity that might make him believe her.
IN THE TIME BETWEEN THE END of summer school and the beginning of the fall semester, Jamie has several unscheduled weeks. In prior years he used those days to prepare for the coming school year. He meticulously made his lesson plans for all five classes. He reread the books or plays or essays that he would assign so that they were fresh in his mind, even though he had taught most of them for years. He would go to school and rearrange his classroom. But not this year. This summer none of that happens, because he finds himself making the drive north many times a week. He tries to convince himself that he is fulfilling the promise he made to Chet, that the trips north are altruistic, but he knows that’s not even half the story.
One Tuesday afternoon when he arrives exactly at one thirty, as he said he would, he finds Celeste waiting at the elevator for him, standing up, holding on to a walker. When he steps out onto the floor, she turns without a word and takes four steps, unaided, before she collapses back into the waiting wheelchair Nadia holds for her.
Jamie is astonished. “You’re walking.…”
“I wanted … a surprise …” she manages to say, breathing hard from the exertion.
“You pulled it off, didn’t you? Wow, you’re walking!”
“A little …”
“But a little leads to a lot, right, Nadia?”
“We think so.”
“I want …”—Celeste struggles for the word and then when she finds it, she grins at him—“a … reward.”
“And what would that be?”
“The ocean … I want … to see … the ocean.”
Jamie looks at Nadia for permission. “Could I take her?”
And before Nadia can answer, Celeste says, “I say yes!”
THE REHAB FACILITY HAS BEAUTIFUL GROUNDS, carefully planted and landscaped with level walkways, fountains with benches around them, but Celeste isn’t interested. Only the ocean will do, and so Jamie has to push her chair past the manicured lawns and the curved flower beds bursting on this late summer’s day with cosmos and zinnias and salvia in shades of purple. They cross the main driveway and come out onto the winding road that brings visitors to the hospital and then continues on.
Jamie pushes Celeste along the shoulder of the road, being careful to look for cars, conscious that her safety is in his hands, but she seems supremely unconcerned. She puts her head back and takes in the feel of the sun on her skin. Her eyes are closed and she is smiling.
“I smell it,” she says to him. And so does he. The ocean.
Carefully, afraid that he might be jostling her newly knit bones too much, he turns off the road and cuts across the yellowing late summer grass of an empty field. He knows that if he can get her to the edge of it, she will be able to overlook the ocean. She will be able to see for miles.
She doesn’t open her eyes. She waits. He doesn’t talk, because he’s concentrating on the uneven surface of the dirt, attempting to pick out the least bumpy path. And then he stops the chair, sets the two hand brakes, and kneels down beside her so that he can see what she will be seeing. And yes, the view is perfect — Swami’s Beach is in front of them. The sun is on the water. The waves are shallow and rhythmic, running up the sand in frilly white ruffles. The horizon line goes on forever, blending with the bluest sky of the summer.
“Here,” he says to her. And she opens her eyes. It’s all there. All in front of her. All that she has longed for these many arduous months.
“Oh, Jamie,” she says, “thank you.”
And she takes his hand and brings it to her and holds it with both of her hands. He lets her. He wants her to.
“Now,” she says, “I can get well.”
Tell Me One Thing
ON A BRIGHT BLUE JULY MORNING, LUCIA opened her eyes with the thought already formed in her brain—Is this the day Maggie starts talking? She had awoken with this question every day for the past thirty-nine days. And every day the answer had been no, not today.
What she hoped for, what the doctor told her not to expect, was that one day, suddenly, her daughter would start chattering again, word would tumble after word, a cascade of sounds and sentences and laughter where now there was only silence and mystery.
Dr. Greenstein took Lucia aside one day and prepared her for whispers, maybe a word at a time, maybe then followed by more silence. “Be alert,” the doctor said, “for the occasional word spoken so softly you might miss it.” But Lucia didn’t want that, one word spoken occasionally. She wanted her child back, her spontaneous, silly, talkative dream of a child.
It had started slowly. On the early Thursday morning, beginning of June, that Lucia began to pack whatever clothes she could fit into two duffel bags, she looked up to see Maggie in her pajamas, thumb in her mouth, black hair chaotic from the sleep that still clung to her like a mist, hugging the doorway of the bedroom.
“Oh, sweetheart …” Lucia said and then stopped, fumbling for what to say next. She knew it had to be the absolute right thing, but she hadn’t expected Maggie to awaken so early and she wasn’t prepared.
Maggie’s eyes scanned the chaos on the bed — heaps of clothing jumbled on top of each other, the open duffel bags.
“Mommy, where are we going?”
Lucia was desperate to believe that they were going on to something better, but she couldn’t have described exactly what that was, so, as she sat down on the bed and reached out for her daughter, Lucia was as literal as she could be. She hoped it would ground them both.
“We’re going to go live by the beach,” Lucia said as her daughter climbed into her lap, “in a place called Ocean Park. We went there once in the summer, to the pier where they have rides and cotton candy. Do you remember?”
Maggie took a minute to consider. She took all questions seriously. Did she remember? “How old was I?”
“Let me see, you were very little. Maybe not quite two.”
“Oh, Mommy,” Maggie said, immediately relieved, “that’s too little to remember. No one could.”
Lucia smiled. “Probably not.” She understood Maggie didn’t like to fail at anything, including remembering things.
“You’re being silly,” Maggie said as she snuggled deeper into Lucia’s arms.
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Did we have fun? Tell me about it. I want to remember.”
And so Lucia described the merry-go-round and the white horse with jewels in his tangled mane that Maggie insisted on riding over and over, Richard at her side, holding her on, but Lucia left that part of the story out.
While her mother talked, Maggie took an inventory of the clothing spread across the bed. She saw her shorts and T-shirts, her sandals and tennis shoes, her mother’s jeans and sweatshirt hoodies and her face clouded over. It was clear who was going and who wasn’t and she stopped her mother mid-sentence. “Why isn’t Daddy coming?”
Lucia took a deep breath. “Because his work is here. He has to go to work.”
“But when he comes home after work, nobody will be home.”
“That’s right.”
“But what about Sunday? Will he come pick me up?”
Lucia wanted to say, Yes, eventually, I hope so, if he comes to some peace with this, but she knew she couldn’t say that to a five-year-old. “When things have settled down, Daddy will come on Sundays, but probably not right away.”