Jacob was talking so fast and gesticulating so wildly that he was running out of breath. Paul was staring at him now like he had three ears. He was glad that he couldn’t see Dr. Dorothy out in the hallway, and he hoped she couldn’t see him. His lungs felt like rocks in his chest, and it was as if a great swarm of bees were building a honeycombed hive inside his skull. He felt the whole room wobble like the door to Oliver’s pickup truck, and then Ella was grabbing something — it looked like a paper bag for him to breathe into. He snatched it and held it up to his mouth, forcing out a deep breath that inflated the bag before either of them realized that it was, in fact, her hand-puppet from art therapy. Its googly eyes rattled as he inhaled, and the green pom-pom that had been its nose fell silently onto the rug.
Ella laughed first — a shocked and delighted giggle that she seemed unable to settle — and as Jacob mimed a little defensive stamping on the offending clown-puppet, that set her off even more. The other patients were all cracking up, and in a moment he felt Dr. Wilkens’s hand on his shoulder, coaxing him to head over to the nurse to get checked out.
Jacob tried to say he was fine, but it didn’t come out. He gave Ella a farewell salute, and she clutched the book to her chest again, mouthing the words thank you as he took shaky steps, backward, out of the room. After getting a little orange juice into his system, the nurse said she thought he’d be all right, but Oliver sent him home early just to be sure. It was only as he rode the bus back that he remembered the other thing he’d meant to write in the front of the book — that he’d signed up for Facebook, using his new phone. But in his haste to leave he’d left it in his locker. He thought, maybe in the morning, then, he’d send her an invitation, so they could be friends.
Sometime later that night, with no book to annotate, cold ginger beef in a takeout container at the foot of the bed, and more hilarity on the television, Jacob decided he’d wait another day or two. Tomorrow he’d get up and go through those gates again to Anchorage House. And she’d be off in her real life, and maybe it was all just better if he left it that way.
OCTOBER
October arrived, and with it the golden leaves around Anchorage House began to fall into the duck pond where Jacob, once again, resumed his daily vigil. Under the willow tree he would stand and think about what he’d said to Irene in the hospital, her smile, their conversation the night before about Hector, and the way Irene had felt in his arms when he carried her down the steps of the Met. He thought about the way she’d bent down before the pyramid walls and how she’d looked standing in front of the painted field of poppies. He remembered her on Shelter Island and how, out of everyone, she’d told him last because she’d known that of all of them, he was the one it would break. He’d always thought that being a cynic would prepare him for something like this, but she’d known that only made it worse, because it made you think you wouldn’t care, and yet of course you would. He thought even further back, to the way she’d looked in the hot tub that night on the roof of the Waldorf Astoria, opaque bra against the snow-blown skyline of Manhattan. He hadn’t gone to her wake, wasn’t planning on going to see the show Sara was organizing, of all the things Irene had been working on that year — not because she’d wasted herself on them but because he didn’t see how any of them could be more powerful than her simple being.
Jacob waited for the old routines at Anchorage House to resume their comfort, but week after week he found no trace of the numbness he’d known before Ella. There were more hellos at Oliver’s office door and the same old snide remarks from Paul, this time about the new behavioral therapist — Dr. Patricia Cain, whose bosom seemed to occupy Paul’s every waking thought. Jacob was ready to find him a pacifier to suck on.
About the only real change was with Sissy Coltrane. She’d gone from being oddly friendly around him to being downright chummy — acting as if they were old buddies, asking if he was thinking about getting some different job soon. At the height of it, she even handed him an assortment of brochures to continuing education programs that she claimed to have stumbled upon one day in a public library somewhere. The programs ranged from nursing to publishing to information technology.
“Oliver told me you were thinking about going back to school. You know, I just feel like you can’t ever underestimate the value of a nice change. I lived out in the Midwest for a while after college. I worked on a ranch. Can you believe it?”
“I can, actually, believe that,” Jacob said.
“You’d love it.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Just think about the poetry you could write in the mountains, the prairies. You know there are still places in this country that no human feet have ever touched? I miss the horses. Fishing in an icy stream on a summer’s day, blackbirds and locusts and all that. I’m telling you, the poems will practically write themselves.”
Jacob gagged. “That’s good, because I sure wouldn’t want to write them.”
Instead of getting annoyed, she slapped his shoulder, as if this were just typical Jacob. It was, but there wasn’t any typical anything between them, so why would she be acting like it?
“Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?” she asked.
After a little thought he said, “Think I’d really like to be a goatherd.”
“Brilliant!” Sissy clapped her hands as if he’d correctly identified a shape in a kindergartner’s lineup.
“I’d live way up on the side of a mountain with a long winding path down to the bottom. There’d be a river there, full of nymphs and woods nearby haunted by panpipes. And people from the town on the other side of the valley would cross the river and hike up the path and buy my goats whenever they needed to make sacrifices to the gods. I’d be known, mountain-wide, for having the best goats for currying godly favor.”
He could tell Sissy was mentally fitting him for a straitjacket. He just didn’t care.
“And there’d be this little cave on the far side of the mountain, at the right edge of the known world, where some horrific monster was rumored to dwell. The kind that spits acid and devours children whole. And anytime something went wrong, we’d all blame it on the monster. Bad weather, dead crops, sick relatives. Can you imagine? If evil was just this thing that lived down the road? Not some North Korean Napoleon or Afghani fundamentalist fanatic. Not some — some all-pervading uneasiness. Not some malignant cell on a mission. Imagine if you could point to a spot on a map and say, There — that’s where bad things come from.”
The phone rang on Sissy’s desk. Dropping her pencils in a pile onto the table, she swooshed over to pick it up. “Sissy Coltrane?… Oh hi, Oliver! You’re—… Oh yes, he’s here. Would you like me to send him over?… Oh. Sure. All right. Okay, bye now! Talk to you later.”
“Whither shall I wander?” Jacob asked, raising his arms to the ceiling.