Her decision to live on the porch happens accidentally but not unintentionally in June when the pink star magnolia in the front yard finally blooms. Every year she waits for the blossoms as big as her palm that smell like anise and oranges. On Monday, her oncologist, a soft-spoken woman who is made of pale rose petals, advises her to let her lumpectomy wound heal. When she finds herself keeping company with her body again instead of grimly supervising it, it will be time to do some serious math, to calculate angles and intensity so that the radiation beam hits her breast and misses what is left of her heart.
On Tuesday, after her 24-hour shift in the ER, she is too tired to change back into her blue blouse and black pants with all their scrupulous buttons and clasps. She showers in the locker room, careful to pat her right breast dry as she had been told to do, then she puts on fresh scrubs and drives home, not the least bit curious about anything or anyone. There is a case of Tempranillo under the kitchen table. Her husband had not claimed it when he left, perhaps because he no longer expected to see anything of value that was associated with her. She stops at the light where a cyclist was killed last month because everyone was so desperate to get away of the hospital. She thought of how the oncologist had paused before leaving the room yesterday. “You might be a bit more tired,” she said and blinked. The oncologist often blinked after gesturing that they were lost in a lawless land, her eyelids almost transparently pink.
They are replacing sewer lines in her neighborhood this summer, smashing everything up to lay new pipes, wrecking sidewalks, driveways, and gardens with aplomb. Yesterday they dispatched the Rose of Sharon by the curb in less than a minute. The streets are a mess, so she parks a few blocks away from her house, next to the overgrown community gardens. Like a manifestation of some collective subconscious, it is an untethered mess—pert California poppies and sunflowers growing shoulder to shoulder with biting thistles and thorny brambles, everything sprawling over and under everything else. She watches a heavy-headed sunflower nod in the breeze. “I could crawl in there and live very well.” This thought declares itself, as her thoughts often do, like subtitles composed by an impaired but not unsympathetic stranger. She rolls down the windows.
The afternoon sun bothers her eyes, so she closes them. She holds one hand in the other in her lap and falls asleep with her seatbelt on. When she wakes up, the clunking and beeping of construction is gone and there is more space between the fractured pieces of the day.
They’ve poured fresh concrete to repair the sidewalk on one side and she cannot be bothered to cross over to the other side of the street, even though she prefers that side with its afternoon shade and blackberries and tinkling water feature hidden behind the solid fence of neighbors she does not know. She walks home in the middle of the street, which is now dirt. The neighbor’s fence ends a foot above the ground; she pauses to listen to the fountain’s splashing code.
Water has spoken to her since childhood, but only twice has she understood what it was trying to say. The first time was at summer camp. She was eleven—everyone was eleven then—and they all took turns pumping the iron handle, forcing water up from the spring. When it was her turn, she drank, then impulsively put her whole head under the spout. She understood, for it was eagerly and tenderly communicated, that the subterranean pockets of water and her half-known self came from the same place. As she walked past the tennis courts, her braids dripping down her back, ambiguities fell from her like scales. She felt certain in her skin.
The second time was three months ago, just as the pandemic was starting. She’d been passing by on her way to the corner store to get cereal and a bottle of wine. Since her husband left, she went to this store almost daily for one thing or another. Everyone else was stockpiling toilet paper and canned tuna so they would never have to leave home, but she liked walking to the store. It put a different frame on the day. That spring afternoon, unexpectedly, the neighbor’s fountain murmurs a name, a name she recognized but had never heard before. It was definitely a name, not just a word. When she pauses, she sees a sizable pair of black sneakers standing on the other side of the fence. Had they heard it too? She waits. After a minute the black sneakers turn away and the name dissolves along with her ability to believe she’d heard it.
She stands in the dirt in front of her home. Today they were digging a hole near her front porch big enough to fit a horse. She steps over discarded bricks and debris reaching for the melon-sized ceramic frog lying face-down in the ivy. She dusts it off and puts it on the steps while bulldozers and front-loaders watch, their hinged orange limbs folded behind her as if wilted by the heat. She pulls herself up the five steps to her screened-in porch, leaving the mail in the mailbox. She does not feel the need to open the front door. She curls up on the twin bed in the corner of the porch, placing her head on the tear-stained pillow without a pillowcase and sleeps.
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It’s getting dark when she finally wakes. She hears people walking their dogs, opening, and closing the magnetic door of the Little Free Library in front of her neighbor’s house, talking into phones, their voices stretching out and back as they try to keep a safe distance from each other. No one can see her when she’s on the little bed unless they come up to the top step and peer through the loose screen that attaches to the waist-high porch wall.
There is a case of Tempranillo under the kitchen table.
She opens her purse and put its contents on the rickety side table: a sweaty bottle of iced tea, half a sandwich wrapped in foil, her wallet, a dry-cleaning receipt, her phone, her keys, her water bottle that kept water ice cold for days, lipstick that she’d never worn and a little yellow tooth-shaped box with one of Lucas’s baby teeth rattling around in it. She’d found it in his desk drawer after he’d died and carried it in her purse for the past year.
She wants a glass of wine. No, she wants someone to bring her a glass of wine. Going inside would mean confronting jarring vectors of memory inside the house—empty stairs, Lucas’s adolescent ghost curled up in the blue armchair by the window, a thin shadow of her husband at the kitchen sink pretending to be the man she wanted him to be.
There is a case of Tempranillo under the kitchen table.
She cannot endure it—these traps that were baited and set for her day after day—the framed photographs, the maddening excess of space and chairs. Every day for the past year, she’s left the doors unlocked, in case someone wanted to come while she was at work and take everything. She pictures thieves wedging her modular sectional sofa, TV, and wildly expensive La Cornue stove into a U-Haul and speeding down the interstate. Yet every time she opens the door the stuff is still there. What harm could come from just refusing it, all of it?
There is a case of Tempranillo under the kitchen table.
But going in to get it would be like stepping onto the wrong train; she would end up on a long narrow bridge, wearing a soft weasel stole around her neck, both of them looking out into the dark with unblinking glass eyes and waxy lips pulled back in perpetual snarls. She gets up, inserts the key, and quickly turns it, locking the deadbolt. She sits back down on the bed to finish the sandwich. The sandwich is dry where it should be wet and damp where it should be dry. She swallows, watching the dust rise and then settle as a car bumped down the gravel road, swerving around a stray chunk of asphalt the size of a human head.
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Every weekday morning the tractors, like phlegmatic old men, started coughing early, so she can get to the hospital by 5:45, so the tech with the blonde ponytail can ask for her birthdate and she can answer “six-thirty-sixty-eight.” She undresses from the waist up and puts the towel they give her over her breasts. Why the towel? Once she gets under the machine, with its whirring intelligence and roving red eye, the towel is discarded. No one wants her to walk the five feet from the dressing room to the radiation table without the towel; this was clear. Every day when she lays down on the machine, the tech with the short brown hair asks if she wants a blanket for her legs or a towel to cover her eyes and every day, she says “no thank you” and turns her head to the left and grips the handlebars above her head. After that there is coffee. Then a patient. And another one and more after that.
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After a particularly horrific shift, when the virus got giddy and infected every corner of the city, she takes off her mask and face shield, dropping them by the sink. She kicks off her clogs just before she steps into the shower and vomits, smelling sour alcohol. She stands there for minutes, spitting bits of herself down the drain. She rolls the wet scrubs off her body, bit by bit. One of the traveler nurses watches her throw the dripping mass in the hamper but says nothing.
No one says anything when she puts two hospital blankets under her arm and walks out to her car or when she takes egg-salad sandwiches and chocolate milks from the fridge in the doctor’s lounge and arranges them in the little cooler she found in the trunk of her car. Clearly some rules have been suspended because of the pandemic but no one has gotten around to clarifying which ones or for how long.
Tonight the ER is a swamp of patients gasping for air, some still insisting that the virus was not real. When she speaks to them, she is both calm and aggressive, “You’re not able to breathe on your own. I’m going to intubate you now.” How many times has she said it this shift? Ten? Eleven? She takes off her white coat and hangs it in the locker next to the blue blouse and black pants that have been there since early June. Anxiety attacks, STDs, food poisoning—these were all unintended consequences resulting from poor planning. These were not emergencies. Now people only came to her emergency room if there was no other option. This was as it should be. It was not without its attributes, this catastrophe.
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She lives on the porch for a week before she thinks of what the fridge inside her house must look like—rancid milk belching, leftover takeout growing soft grey fingers. She doesn’t want a rat coming through the missing floorboard in the corner, so she takes her trash from the porch back with her to the hospital each morning and rinses out the cooler, leaving it to dry on top of her locker.
She brings home Embryology and Neonatology, the heaviest book from the ER staff lounge, and puts it over the hole. It is 1,100 pages explaining the cascade of cellular decisions that are astoundingly similar from person to person, but never the same. She flips past pictures of the heart as a tube, then as a twisted tube, then as a relentless resilient machine. She finds the part that describes the embryology of the breast. “Mammary glands have relatively simple architecture.” She pictures white grains of rice sculpted into a series of wee pagodas.
Later, when she makes the decision to never go back inside, she will scoot the book back a bit, sit on the edge of it and pee through the hole in the porch. She thinks, life is getting simpler, and isn’t that what she really needed? She will say to herself that everything was falling into place and wasn’t that a welcome change?
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She has to think about it to remember the last time she had a drink. The skin of her breast has started to peel off, like a bad sunburn. Across the street, the new neighbor boy totters on his new two-wheel bike, wiggling the handlebars back and forth to try and balance. “Go faster, Arthur!” his father shouts, jogging behind. The box under the table is quiet now, no longer announcing itself at irregular intervals. How is it, she thinks, that some kinds of balance require a certain speed?
The boy falls into the grass and falls into the grass, and each time he gets back on the bike before the surprise of falling has fully worked through his small body. He begins to glow in the dusk, his red shirt and yellow helmet bold slashes of paint when he finds his speed. “Look!” he shouts. She looks and the father looks, and the trees look, and the moon looks, and the sun looks over its shoulder as it passes out of sight and the boy is now of them and beyond them, a quick learner. Going, going, gone.
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She and Lucas are in his room on the psych ward of her hospital eighteen months ago. Her cells are bending under the weight of cancer, but she does not know this. Lucas presses his palms into his eye sockets, unable to accomplish any other gesture of expression.
“I don’t think this is a good idea.” She sizes up the psychiatry resident—his round wire-rimmed glasses, his clipboard, the uneven part of his not quite clean hair. This was before masks, when people could still see each other’s expressions. She smiles her poisonous smile. “May we please speak to your attending?”
The psychiatrists discharge Lucas against her wishes because he is eighteen and able to make his own decisions. They listen to her words, but they do not appreciate her tone. They actually say this. Lucas finally promises them he does not want to hurt himself anymore. As if they could know this is true. As if anyone could know anything. Lucas says he is okay, shoving his shirt and sweatpants into the duffle bag she’d brought. “Mom,” he says. She raises her eyebrows. He sighs, “Let’s just go.”
Fear, in her unfortunate personal alchemy, is expressed as rage. When they leave the room with its beige walls and silent, weak-chinned roommate, her face is rigid. She’s determined not to speak, lest she start ripping equipment from the walls and upending furniture. Lucas says goodbye to the unit clerk, a plump creature with acne and purple hair who fumbled with the button to open the locked doors.
Walking to the car, she tries to soften the harsh lines she’s drawn. She doesn’t want Lucas to think she is angry with him, even if she is.
She steers through the forest that surrounded the hospital, lilting hills and curves designed to slow drivers down to a contemplative speed. She hits a raccoon once, going over fifty miles an hour, on her way into work. She doesn’t even stop to move it off the road.
“What if we go to the airport?” She feels the question’s tail fins flicking as it escaped her mouth.
Lucas presses the button to open the sunroof. Spruce and pine and dirt have flooded the narrow space between them.
“And do what?”
“Catch a flight.” She likes the way that sounds, like something, anything, was within easy reach.
“To where?”
“I don’t know. That’s the point. Somewhere. Anywhere.”
She will look back at this moment and see that she was trying too hard and in the wrong way.
Lucas closes his eyes. He had put his wallet under his pillow at the hospital, and his roommate had noticed this and as soon as Lucas left, he had taken the cash and tossed the rest into the trash.
She sleeps on the sofa that night because her husband is out of town. She has a few glasses of the expensive Malbec and is too woozy to face the stairs but tells herself she needs to be in the living room to hear if Lucas tried to leave the house. He waits until she is lightly snoring to glide past her down to the basement where rope could be knotted squarely to the cross beam. Freshly laundered clothes rest blindly in soft piles as he kicks the chair out from under his feet.
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It is July. She has been living on the porch for thirty days.
“You’re done!” The blonde ponytail tech leads her to a place in the hall across from the bathroom she used every morning before she went to sit in the treatment waiting room. The tech gestures to a plaque engraved with the words “Ring this bell when you’ve finished your last cancer treatment to celebrate this important moment in your journey!” A small silver ball chain hangs down from a metal hammer that is poised adjacent to a saucer-sized bell, reminiscent of an old alarm clock.
She looks quizzically at the tech. “Is this new?”
“Nope! Ring the bell!” The young woman’s smile is lightly forced. They have radiation patients back-to-back, all day long, despite the virus.
“But I’m not really done with treatment. I have to take pills for at least the next five years. Maybe ten.”
A hospital transporter approaches them from one end of the narrow hall. He is pushing a skeletal Black woman in a wheelchair. Her eyes are closed. Swathes of blankets are fitted around her arms and lap and legs. Her hair is tucked into a bright red head wrap. She looks like a well-tended Queen on a floating throne.
“That’s okay.” She untwists her purse strap to lie flat on her shoulder and shifts her weight. Her right breast feels like it has been sautéed in grease then nibbled on by sharp little teeth.
“I don’t think I should if I’m not really done.”
“But you’re done with radiation therapy! You came every day for a month, and you don’t have to come any more.” The tech gently squeezes her arm.
“Ring the damn bell already,” the Queen says as she passed by them. Her attendant parks her carefully in the waiting room.
She gives the chain a half-hearted pull, then pulls again, harder, to get the hammer to hit the bell.
“Some people tell me they can feel the radiation or even smell it,” the oncologist says at her last visit. “The mind is very powerful.”
“Powerful at making things up?”
“No,” the oncologist tilts her head, her cornflower-blue eyes looking at her with a mix of amusement and concern. “At filling in gaps.”
She thinks about the truck load of dirt that had been dumped back in the hole by her porch.
It is time to leave.
The ER is so full that only the patients who need video monitoring are put in actual rooms. Everyone else is on stretchers in the hallway or still in the waiting room.
“Are you gay?” The young woman pulls on her fingers. “I could trust you if you were gay.” Her name is Cindy. Cindy has a mohawk of orange curly hair that is matted with dried blood because she’d jumped from the deck of her second-floor apartment and split open her scalp. She has also broken her right ankle.
“Cindy wants to be admitted to psych,” Dr. Schuller says, handing her the ER phone and code pager. “I paged the resident to come and evaluate her, but I haven’t heard back yet.” He tapped out a bum-bada-bum-bum on the unit clerk’s desk with his hands and grins. Dr. Schuller likes dating nursing students and playing golf. He often refers to the fact that he’d had a vasectomy after his divorce. He winks and says “You can’t be too careful” when in fact he’s gotten the vasectomy, so he doesn’t have to be careful at all. When he’d found out about her breast cancer diagnosis, he’d said “Good thing you got that mammogram, eh?” Then he’d winked and said, “You can’t be too careful.” She wants him to get syphilis.
“When is the psychiatrist coming? Is it going to be a resident or a real doctor?” Cindy watches as a naked man in a wheelchair zooms past, followed by a sprinting police officer. “I don’t think I can be safe at home.”
Dr. Schuller must have been busy. He had perfunctorily stapled the edges of Cindy’s scalp together and she still had blood clots in her hair. Her mask covers the lower part of her face, but she sounds like she might not have all her teeth.
She frowns and palpates Cindy’s purple ankle, plump as a grapefruit. “You’re going to need a cast on this.” She stands at the computer, typing discharge orders. She wants to leave now before Cindy really starts talking.
“You don’t give a shit.” Cindy closes her eyes and begins whispering to herself, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
Her fingers stop typing and she feels the familiar weight of three-year-old Lucas in her arms, his curly hair tucked under her chin. Some kid had pushed him, and he’d scraped his shin, and he was bleeding. She rocks him the way parents do. He sobs into her chest as if he were trying to cry his way back into her. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” She holds him and holds him—the two of them were a country to which they both pledged their makeshift allegiance.
She pulls a folding chair to Cindy’s bedside and sits down. “What made you go out on your deck today?”
Cindy opens her eyes and looks at her. “Why do you ask it like that? Everybody else says ‘Why did you jump?’”
“Most of us try to avoid the bad thing, the thing we know we’re not supposed to do.”
She hands Cindy a damp washcloth from the sink, and she scrubs blood from her palms. A silver Kokopelli figure dangles from her right ear.
After Lucas died, when she and her ex-husband were still trying to make a go of it, they’d taken a weekend trip to Santa Fe. Kokopelli had been everywhere, hanging from every porch, on every souvenir mug in the gift shops. She’d opened one of the small packages in their well-appointed hotel bathroom. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she’d muttered, holding the hunchbacked flute-playing bar of soap.
Her husband stands in the doorway, tapping his fingers against the door frame. They had planned to go to the opera. “Too many people,” she announces when she gets out of the very nice, very hot shower and into the luxurious white terrycloth robe.
“You’re almost a person too,” he says. He excelled at saying spiteful things in a gentle tone.
“Perhaps.” If she is a person, she is the kind of person who wanted another glass of wine and didn’t want to go to the opera.
She pours her third glass from a bottle whose label showed Kokopelli playing his flute at the edge of a cliff and stepped out onto the balcony. There is a party at the hotel’s outdoor pool. Below her, bow-tied waiters offer trays of canapés and colorful mixed drinks to guests who gathered around the asymmetric angular pool. Why was everyone making such an effort? She remembers Lucas in his new blue suit with braces on his teeth standing on stage with his sixth-grade class, reciting the Gettysburg Address, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”
Her husband goes to the opera by himself, and she watches a movie on TV and calls down to the front desk to see if she could purchase the robe and they say yes. She pays for it right then and there with her own card so as not to complicate the division of assets.
The ER phone buzzes in her coat pocket. She locks eyes with Cindy.
“If you know you want to die and you’re trying not to, it’s the deck you avoid. Because you know you might not be able to avoid the jump.”
Cindy looks down. “I don’t know if this is going to make any sense, but it was such a beautiful day, and I felt all wrong for it. I thought the sun on my face might pull me out of it—that’s why I went out there. But I couldn’t stand it. The trees were so fucking green. I couldn’t take it for one more second.”
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Would you like me to deliver a message for you?”
She props herself up on her elbows, holding her breath as her breast hisses in protest. It is Sunday morning and the individual with his nose pressed against the screen waits silently while she sorts out where she is.
Last night, the ER manager made sure they all attended the annual employee picnic at Clover Park this year because morale was so low. “What we need,” she says to someone she could not reliably recall, “are twenty more ventilators and a month off, not veggie burgers and quinoa salad.” She remembers eating a rice crispy treat followed by four mojitos, then, at some point, walking home. Her brain feels slippery and there is a lot of grass in her bed.
“Or a package,” the voice says. She vaguely recalls a moonlit walk across a neighbor’s freshly mown lawn, holding something, her flip flops maybe, in one hand and supporting her sore breast with the other.
“What?” She shifts her weight in the creaky bed. This visitor, this person, is suspiciously short. Is he on his knees for some reason? She does not fully understand the situation.
“I am making a delivery service,” the voice says brightly. She squints, letting her senses start over from the beginning. This is a child. This is a child talking to her as if he’d known her forever, as children do.
She gulps cold water from her water bottle, surprised to see cigarette butts in her empty chocolate milk container. “What’s your name?” She slides the container and an unfamiliar lighter into the side table’s drawer.
“Arthur.” He presses his face further into the already loose screen until his nose is flat.
“Do you want to come in, Arthur?” She can’t find her mask. She unlatches the
hook anyway.
“Don’t mind if I do.” He speaks like Teddy Roosevelt in a five-year old body. His shoes barely touch the floor when he sits on the porch swing inspecting her whole arrangement—the cooler, the table, the bed, the textbook, the dry-cleaning plastic shoved under her bed.
“Good luck on your big test.” He nods sagely, pointing at the textbook.
She shakes her head, slowly because it hurt. “I’m not taking any test.” But the moment she hears herself say it, she knows it isn’t true. Her brain feels like it has been slammed with a skillet.
“My dad is in school and has books and he has to put them all out on the kitchen table when he has a big test.” Arthur looks at the side table beside the bed. “You could use that table.”
She drinks from her water bottle again, feeling the bright chill travel down her esophagus, while he watches her, swinging his feet. He is waiting for something. He looks like the kind of kid who could wait a long time.
Pieces of the evening came back to her, like slides scattered on the floor that she has to hold up to the light: Bob Schueller balancing a badminton racket on his chin, playing truth or dare with the ER crew from nights, Bob whistling and high fiving her when she lifted the pack of Parliaments from their manager’s purse. They had walked through the lawn together. He had jokingly offered to hold her breast for her, and she had said no and pinched his arm. They had smoked and talked on the porch until she was ready for him to go and then he had left. He had annoyed her daily for five years. What had she been saying when he’d held her hand?
Wincing, she sits up. There is something in the bottom of one of the plastic cups on the windowsill. Arthur watches as she fishes out Lucas’s baby tooth. She sighs and waits for some explanation, but she has none.
“Do you want to send a message?” Arthur holds out a small, lined note pad and a pencil. His hand is still baby-pudgy with dimpled knuckles. She smiles.
“Sure.” She writes something, tearing off the piece of paper and folding it in half.
He takes the paper and goes down the stairs to his red wagon. He lifts the lid off a shoebox, puts the paper inside, puts the lid back on and pulls the wagon down the sidewalk a few feet before turning back to her.
“Will you require a reply?” He shades his eyes with his hand.
“Yes.” She is taken with his incongruous formality. “A reply would be greatly appreciated.”
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She is almost to the end of the block when she realizes she doesn’t need to go to the hospital, because last year she requested this week in August off to help Lucas move to college.
It had taken so much frantic cutting with the knife to get his body down so she could start CPR. He was cold, but she had compressed his heart until the paramedics pulled her away. She had wandered from room to room for a week, letting the phone ring, drinking wine from a plastic cup, and taking strange inventory of all the things she’d accumulated, layers and layers of misguided decisions, torpid ephemera.
It is still early morning. Fresh asphalt meets the newly sculpted curb in a faultless seam. She turns to go back home and out of the corner of her eye, she sees some kind of animal drinking from a dripping hose that’s under the neighbor’s fence. She freezes as a small fox trots right past her with its tapered face and extravagantly orange tail. The fox pauses where her vision falters, then leaps into the garden’s tangled green. Every living thing is vehemence and irreverence incarnate.
