Unpossible Page 5

  The man looks stricken. "Oh my God," the man says quietly. "Oh my God."

  They begin to trudge across the drained sea. They trade stories about their adventures. The man with the wolf suit takes out his wallet and shows him pictures. He has a granddaughter he’s never met, six years old, a real hellion by all accounts. "She lives three states away," he says.

  A dozen yards from the shore they see the trolley. The little car glides smoothly around the perimeter of the lake and stops in their path. It rolls a few feet forward, a few feet back. Ding ding!

  They approach it carefully and without speaking, as they would a deer at a watering hole. It trembles as they step up onto the gleaming sideboards. They sit on the polished wooden benches. It’s a shame their clothes are so filthy.

  The trolley doesn’t move.

  "Wait," he says, and the man in the wolf suit watches him dig into his pocket. The dime he found on the roadway is still there. The coin clinks into the tin fare box and the car jerks into motion. Soon they’re zipping across the plain toward the forest and the black ribbon of highway.

  "And yourself?" the man with the suit asks.

  "No grandchildren," he says. "No children. Not anymore."

  The man frowns and nods. "We’ll find someone for the bike," he says. "The world is full of children."

  Damascus

  When Paula became conscious of her surroundings again, the first thing she sensed was his fingers entwined in hers.

  She was strapped to the ambulance backboard—each wrist cuffed in nylon, her chest held down by a wide band—to stop her from flailing and yanking out the IV. Only his presence kept her from screaming. He gazed down at her, dirty-blond hair hanging over blue eyes, pale cheeks shadowed by a few days’ stubble. His love for her radiated like cool air from a block of ice.

  When they reached the hospital he walked beside the gurney, his hand on her shoulder, as the paramedics wheeled her into the ER. Paula had never worked in the ER but she recognized a few of the faces as she passed. She took several deep breaths, her chest tight against the nylon strap, and calmly told the paramedics that she was fine, they could let her go now. They made reassuring noises and left the restraints in place. Untying her was the doctor’s call now.

  Eventually an RN came to ask her questions. A deeply tanned, heavy-set woman with frosted hair. Paula couldn’t remember her name, though they’d worked together for several years, back before the hospital had fired Paula. Now she was back as a patient.

  "And what happened tonight, Paula?" the nurse said, her tone cold. They hadn’t gotten along when they worked together; Paula had a temper in those days.

  "I guess I got a bit dizzy," she said.

  "Seizure," said one of the paramedics. "Red Cross guy said she started shaking on the table, they had to get her onto the floor before she fell off. She’d been seizing for five or six minutes before we got there so we brought her in. We gave her point-one of Lorazepam and she came out of it during the ride."

  "She’s the second epileptic this shift," the nurse said to them.

  Paula blinked in surprise. Had one of the yellow house women been brought in? Or one of the converts? She looked to her side, and her companion gazed back at her, amused, but not giving anything away. Everything was part of the plan, but he wouldn’t tell her what the plan was. Not yet.

  The nurse saw Paula’s shift in attention and her expression hardened. "Let’s have you talk to a doctor, Paula."

  "I’m feeling a lot better," Paula said. Didn’t even grit her teeth.

  They released the straps and transferred her to a bed in an exam room. One of the paramedics set her handbag on the bedside table. "Good luck now," he said.

  She glanced at the bag and quickly looked away. Best not to draw attention to it. "I’m sorry if I was any trouble," she said.

  The nurse handed her a clipboard of forms. "I don’t suppose I have to explain these to you," she said. Then: "Is there something wrong with your hand?"

  Paula looked down at her balled fist. She concentrated on loosening her fingers but they refused to unclench. That had been happening more often lately. Always the left hand. "I guess I’m nervous."

  The nurse slowly nodded, not buying it. She made sure Paula could hold the clipboard and write, then left her.

  But not alone. He slouched in a bedside chair, legs stretched in front of him, the soles of his bare feet almost black. His shy smile was like a promise. I’m here, Paula. I’ll always be here for you.

  Richard’s favorite album was Nirvana’s In Utero. She destroyed that CD first.

  He’d moved out on a Friday, filed for divorce on the following Monday. He wanted custody of their daughter. Claire was ten then, a sullen and secretive child, but Paula would sooner burn the house down around them than let him have her. Instead she torched what he loved most. On the day Paula got the letter about the custody hearing, she pulled his CDs and LPs and DATs from the shelves—hundreds of them, an entire wall of the living room, and more in the basement. She carried them to the backyard by the box. Claire wailed in protest, tried to hide some of the cases, and eventually Paula had to lock the girl in her room.

  In the yard Paula emptied a can of lighter fluid over the pile, went into the garage for the gas can, splashed that on as well. She tossed the Nirvana CD on top.

  The pile of plastic went up in a satisfying whoosh. After a few minutes the fire started to die down—the CDs wouldn’t stay lit—so she went back into the house and brought out his books and music magazines.

  The pillar of smoke guided the police to her house. They told her it was illegal to burn garbage in the city. Paula laughed. "Damn right it’s garbage." She wasn’t going to be pushed around by a couple of cops. Neighbors came out to watch. Fuck them, she thought.

  She lived in a neighborhood of Philadelphia that outsiders called "mixed." Blacks and Latinos and whites, a handful of Asians and Arabs. Newly renovated homes with Mexican tile patios, side by side with crack houses and empty lots. Paula moved there from the suburbs to be with Richard and never forgave him. Before Claire was born she made him install an alarm system and set bars across the windows. She felt like they were barely holding on against a tide of criminals and crazies.

  The yellow house women may have been both. They lived across the street and one lot down, in a cottage that was a near-twin of Paula’s. Same field stone porch and peaked roofs, same narrow windows. But while Paula’s house was painted a tasteful slate blue, theirs blazed lemon yellow, the doors and window frames and gutters turned out in garish oranges and brilliant whites. Five or six women, a mix of races and skin tones, wandered in and out of the house at all hours. Did they have jobs? They weren’t old, but half of them had trouble walking, and one of them used a cane. Paula was an RN, twelve years working all kinds of units in two different hospitals, and it looked to her like they shared some kind of neuromuscular problem, maybe early MS. Their yellow house was probably some charity shelter.

  On the street the women seemed distracted, sometimes talking to themselves, until they noticed someone and smiled a bit too widely. They always greeted Paula and Richard, but they paid special attention to Claire, speaking to her in the focused way of old people and kindergarten teachers. One of them, a gaunt white woman named Steph who wore the prematurely weathered face of a long-time meth user, started stopping by more often in the months after Richard moved out. She brought homemade food: Tupperware bowls of bean soup, foil-wrapped tamales, rounds of bread. "I’ve been a single mom," she said. "I know how tough things can be on your own." She started babysitting Claire a couple nights a week, staying in Paula’s house so Claire could fall asleep in her own bed. Some afternoons she took Claire with her on trips to the grocery or the park. Paula kept waiting for the catch. It finally came in the form of a sermon.

  "My life was screwed up," Steph said to Paula one afternoon. Claire had vanished to her bedroom to curl up with her headphones. The two women sat in the kitchen eating cheese bread someone in th
e yellow house had made. Steph drank wine while Paula worked her way through her afternoon Scotch. Steph talked frankly about her drug use, the shitty boyfriends, the money problems. "I was this close to cutting my wrists. If Jesus hadn’t come into my life, I wouldn’t be here right now."

  Here we go, Paula thought. She drank silently while Steph droned on about how much easier it was to have somebody walk beside her, someone who cared. "Your own personal Jesus," Steph said. "Just like the song."

  Paula knew the song—Richard loved that ’80s crap. He even had the Johnny Cash remake, until she’d turned his collection to slag. "No thanks," Paula said, "I don’t need any more men in my life."

  Steph didn’t take offense. She kept coming back, kept talking. Paula put up with the woman because with Richard out of the house she needed help with Claire—and because she needed her alone time more than ever. The yellow house women may have been Jesus freaks, but they were harmless. That’s what she told herself, anyway, until the night she came home to find Claire gone.

  Paula knew how to play the hospital game. Say as little as possible, act normal, don’t look at things no one else could see. She knew her blood tests would come out normal. They’d shrug and check her out by noon.

  Her doctor surprised her, though. They’d assigned her to Louden, a short, trim man with a head shaved down to gray stubble who had a reputation among the nurses for adequacy: not brilliant, but not arrogant either, a competent guy who pushed the patients through on schedule. But something had gotten into him—he was way too interested in her case. He filled her afternoon with expensive MRIs, fMRIs, and PET scans. He brought in specialists.

  Four of them, two neurologists and a psychiatrist she recognized, and one woman she didn’t know who said she was an epidemiologist. They came in one at a time over the afternoon, asking the same questions. How long had she experienced the seizures? What did they feel like when they struck? Did she know others with these symptoms? They poked her skin to test nerve response, pulled and flexed the fingers of her clenched hand. Several times they asked her, "Do you see people who aren’t there?"

  She almost laughed. He sat beside her the entire time, his arm cool against her own. Could anyone be more present?

  The only questions that unsettled her came from the epidemiologist, the doctor she didn’t recognize. "Do you eat meat?" the doctor asked. Paula said sure. And the doctor, a square-faced woman with short brown hair, asked a dozen follow-up questions, writing down exactly what kinds of meat she ate, how often, whether she cooked it herself or ate out.

  At the end of the day they moved Paula into a room with a middle-aged white woman named Esther Wynne, a true southern lady who’d put on make-up and sprayed her hair as though at any moment she’d pop those IV tubes from her arms and head out to a nice restaurant.

  Doctor Louden stopped by once more before going home that night. He sat heavily beside Paula’s bed, ran a hand over his gray scalp. "You haven’t been completely open with us," he said. He seemed as tired as she was.

  "No, probably not," she said. Behind him, her companion shook his head, laughing silently.

  Louden smiled as well, but fleetingly. "You have to realize how serious this is. You’re the tenth person we’ve seen with symptoms like yours, and there are more showing up in hospitals around the city. Some of my colleagues think we may be seeing the start of an epidemic. We need your help to find out if that’s the case."

  "Am I contagious?"

  He scratched his chin, looked down. "We don’t think so. You don’t have a temperature, any signs of inflammation—no signs that this is a virus or a bacterial infection."

  "Then what is it you think I have?"

  "We don’t have a firm idea yet," he said. He was holding back, treating her like a dumb patient. "We can treat your symptoms though. We’ll try to find out more tomorrow, but we think you have a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. There are parts of your brain that—"

  "I know what epilepsy is."

  "Yes, but TLE is a bit ... " He gestured vaguely, then took several stapled pages from his clipboard and handed them to her. "I’ve brought some literature. The more you understand what’s happening, the better we’ll work together." He didn’t sound like he believed that.

  Paula glanced at the pages. Printouts from a web site.

  "Read it over and tomorrow you and I can—oh, good." A nurse had entered the room with a plastic cup in her hand; the meds had arrived. Louden seemed relieved to have something else to talk about. "This is Topamax, an epilepsy drug."

  "I don’t want it," she said. She was done with drugs and alcohol.

  "I wouldn’t prescribe this if it wasn’t necessary," Louden said. His doctor voice. "We want to avoid the spikes in activity that cause seizures like today’s. You don’t want to fall over and crack your skull open, do you?" This clumsy attempt at manipulation would have made the old Paula furious.

  Her companion shrugged. It didn’t matter. All part of the plan.

  Paula accepted the cup from the nurse, downed the two pills with a sip of water. "When can I go home?" she said.

  Louden stood up, ran a hand over his scalp. "I’ll talk to you again in the morning. I hate to tell you this, but there are a few more tests we have to run."

  Or maybe they were keeping her here because they did think she was contagious. The start of an epidemic, he’d said.

  Paula nodded understandingly and Louden seemed relieved. As he reached the door Paula said, "Why did that one doctor—Gerrhardt?—ask me if I ate meat?"

  He turned. "Dr. Gerrholtz. She’s not with the hospital."

  "Who’s she with then?"

  "Oh, the CDC," he said casually. As if the Centers for Disease Control dropped by all the time. "Don’t worry, it’s their job to ask strange questions. We’ll have you out of here as soon as we can."

  Paula came home from work to find the door unchained and the lights on. It was only 7:15, but in early November that meant it had been dark for more than hour. Paula stormed through the house looking for Claire. The girl knew the rules: come home from school, lock the door, and don’t pick up the phone unless caller-ID showed Paula’s cell or work number. Richard took her, she thought. Even though he won partial custody, he wanted to take everything from her.

  Finally she noticed the note, in a cleared space on the counter between a stack of dishes and an open cereal box. The handwriting was Steph’s.

  Paula marched to the yellow house and knocked hard. Steph opened the door. "It’s all right," Steph said, trying to calm her down. "She’s done her homework and now she’s watching TV."

  Paula pushed past her into a living room full of second-hand furniture and faded rugs. Every light in the house seemed to be on, making every flat surface glow: the oak floors scrubbed to a buttery sheen, the freshly-painted daffodil walls, the windows reflecting bright lozenges of white. Something spiced and delicious fried in the kitchen, and Paula was suddenly famished. She hadn’t eaten anything solid since breakfast.

  Claire sat on a braided oval rug, her purple backpack beside her. A nature show played on the small boxy TV but the girl wasn’t really watching. She had her earphones in, listening to the CD player in her lap. Lying on the couch behind her was a thin black woman in her fifties or sixties.

  "Claire," Paula said. The girl pretended to not hear. "Claire, take off your headphones when I’m talking to you." Her voice firm but reasonable. The Good Mother. "You know you’re not supposed to leave the house."

  Claire didn’t move.

  "The police were at the green house," Steph said. A rundown place two doors down from Paula with motorcycles always in the front yard. Drug dealers, Paula thought. "I went over to check on Claire, and she seemed nervous, so I invited her over. I told her it would be all right."

  "You wouldn’t answer your phone," Claire said without looking away from the TV. She still hadn’t taken off the headphones. Acting up in front of the women, thinking Paula wouldn’t discipline her in public.

&nbs
p; "Then you keep calling," Paula said. She’d forgotten to turn on her phone when she left the hospital. She’d stopped off for a drink, not more than thirty, forty-five minutes, then came home, no later than she’d come home dozens of times in the past. "You don’t leave the house."

  Steph touched Paula’s elbow, interrupting again. She nodded at the woman on the couch. "This is Merilee."

  The couch looked like the woman’s permanent home. On the short table next to her head was a half-empty water glass, a Kleenex box, a mound of damp tissue. A plastic bucket sat on the floor below it. Merilee lay propped up on pillows, her body half covered by a white sheet. Her legs were bent under her in what looked like a painful position, and her left arm curled up almost to her chin, where her hand trembled like a nervous animal. She watched the TV screen with a blissed-out smile, as if this was the best show in the world.

  Steph touched the woman’s shoulder, and she looked up. "Merilee, this is Paula."

  Merilee reached up with her good right arm. Her aim was off; first she held it out to a point too far right, then swung it slowly around. Paula lightly took her hand. Her skin was dry and cool.

  The woman smiled and said something in another language. Paula looked to Steph, and then Merilee said, "I eat you."

  "I’m sorry?" She couldn’t have heard that right.

  "It’s a Fore greeting," Steph said, pronouncing the word For-ay. "Merilee’s people come from the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Merilee, Paula is Claire’s mother."

  "Yes, yes, you’re right," Merilee said. Her mouth moved more than the words required, lips constantly twisting toward a smile, distorting her speech. "What a lovely girl." It wasn’t clear if she meant Claire or Paula. Then her hand slipped away like a scarf and floated to her chest. She lay back and turned her gaze back to the TV, still smiling.