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I See You Everywhere - Part Four

By Julia Glass

Larney's roses await me. They are nicer than I thought -- pungent and meaty, flowers of pedigree and substance. The card reads, With profound apologies & unswervingly tropical affections, Yours and yours only, L. At the top, a deft slash through J. LARNED QUINCY POOLE, indigo on ivory.

Thanks to Dr. Slocum, I have a private room at dormitory cost. After two sessions of dramatic pleading, the day nurse finally agreed to turn off the fluorescent light that runs like a racing stripe around the upper walls. So the light in my room is now sun, which swells and fades as the clouds come and go, the way a pupil widens and constricts. In a week, it's the closest I've come to open air, which I desperately crave. I nap erratically, black holes of dreamless sleep that quench like rationed swigs of cold spring water. Each time I wake, my head aches with the labor of healing.

Dad is my first visitor here, exhausted from hurricane vigil. For half of every summer, hurricanes are to my father what national economists are to CEOs: whispering Disaster, disaster right in your ear, then half the time saying No, sorry, just joshing!

It's the first time I've seen him since coming to, but Dr. Slocum tells me he was here on the second day of my delirium. Between tests, he sat by my gurney while Mom paced and cursed and bargained with my absent self. Now he carries a rose -- a Mrs. Anthony Waterer -- red as a cherry sno-cone. He loves reciting the names of his roses, most of them Baroness This, Comtesse That, Principessa Hooha. He enjoys evoking these Old World grande-dames (though he didn't exactly marry one; maybe that's why). He carries my rose in a mason jar with a punctured lid, which he will have packed in a picnic cooler to keep it fresh for the two-hour drive.

It's Dad who tells me exactly what happened, and the story seems to give a purpose to his presence that makes him less uncomfortable in mine.

The uncle had a crew member cancel before an important race, and Larney recruited me. Entering the last leg, a strong wind at our stern, we were neck and neck with another boat to port. When their bow began to veer toward ours, the skipper panicked: He tacked before us when we had the right of way. I was on the foredeck, raising the spinnaker, which unfurled against my face and snapped in the wind like gunfire, leaving me blind and deaf to all warnings. When the two boats collided and our bow rode up over theirs, I was smacked in the chest by their boom and hurled backward into the water. As I went in, the jib sheet snared my right arm, snapping the ulna; then my head slammed against the side of our boat. Larney dove in and passed me up to the other crew members. Somebody radioed for an ambulance. The paramedics, en route to the nearest ER, called in the medevac from Boston.

Though Dad inhabits the sailing world and lives a life many would kill for, in his dreams he's just the plantsman he was schooled to be, pruning vines, cataloging spores, protecting fragile blooms from extinction. This old long¬ing gives him a professorial tone when he tells tales, not the blow-me-down air of your average nautical windbag. As I eat my dinner, he re-enacts methodically the way in which his youngest daughter almost died.

"But here you are, safe," he says at last. His tone is so reverent, it makes me nervous.

"After a fashion!" I say, to lighten him up, but he doesn't smile.

"I would like to impress upon you that your mother and I were terrified. Please realize, this is the third time our town police chief has materialized at our front door on your behalf. Clem, honey, it is my sincerest, most heartfelt wish that this time will have been the last. The very arrival of this man's car in our driveway again would do us in." He's still holding onto his flower, as if he's not sure I deserve it. Condensation from the jar drips onto the floor and one of his boat moccasins (a new pair).

"Dad, it's my wish too," I say, but I have to suppress the urge to giggle at his solemnity. Apology is no more my style than gushing about grief, love, and mortality is his.

He kisses me on the cheek and sets Mrs. Waterer beside Larney's bouquet. He stops to finger one of the pink blooms, now fully open. "Souvenir d'un ami. Your young man is not undiscerning."

Before leaving, he reaches inside his jacket. "This looks important," he says. The envelope is addressed to me at Jerry's, forwarded in his scrawl to Rhode Island, and I wonder if Dad saw the irony: his daughter bashed up in an ICU while there's her name, Clement Jardine, typed on a clean white surface, placid as a stormless sea, c/o Mr. Beau Jardine, in whose care she has not been for some time. I'll bet it made him feel awful, that c/o. It makes me want to say something reassuring, but I fail again, because he is out the door, with a taut wave, before I can think of a thing.

The return address is Jackson, Wyoming, and the letter inside -- from someone whose name means nothing to me, Department of Game and Fish -- tells me that he and his colleagues were "more than impressed" by our meeting and hope I will, taking into account the funding constraints we discussed, accept a position as research biologist on the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team and move myself out west by September. I concentrate hard, but no bells go off, no boards light up, no fireworks fill that dense black sky. I have flown across the country, seen a place I've always yearned to see, landed myself an impressive if poorly paid job, and right now I can't remember a bit of it. I am not going to tell this to Dr. A. I can only hope dependable Larney will tell me about the sights I saw and, if I told him enough, about the people I more than impressed.

The sky matches Larney's roses when the nurse shows up to take my tray. I tell her not to turn on the lights just yet.

Jerry answers the phone, like he always does, "Heya."

"Hey yourself." My fingers on the receiver burn, as if I've just come inside from a bitter cold day. I trample right over the pause: "Just us lately comatose invalids here, don't mind us." I stare at my laid-up wrist, at the bruise seeping from under the cast. I apply what I know about healing to its spectrum of yellows and blues.

"I heard you're in the hospital. I'm sorry." This is the voice I've heard, deep and careful, when he's talking with difficult but wealthy clients.

"'Sorry.' Ah." I look up; my room is nearly dark. When I switch on the reading lamp beside the bed, I switch on my reflection in the window. I'm a mess, except for the ivory satin pajamas that Larney brought when they let me out of purgatory. "Listen, Jerry, just tell me this. Back in, oh, late June, why would I have been hitchhiking outside Boston, madder than Croesus?"

He laughs briefly. "I think it's 'richer.'"

"What's richer?"

"Never mind." He says gently, almost playfully, "Are you drinking?"

"Jerry, I have amnesia. I'm in the hospital. Cocktails are not one of the amenities offered. So help me out here. The last thing I know, I'm maybe moving in with you. Then it's five weeks later, I'm at death's door in the ICU, and you are nowhere in sight."

"ICU . . . my God, the ICU--"

"As in, I see you dumped me when I wasn't looking. Yes?"

"Bad timing, Clem. I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say."

"Bad timing?"

"Your forgetting, I mean. This is..." He sighs loudly. "What a mess."

My reflection grows more and more insistent. A winking jet soars through my bedridden self.

"Would it be a good idea or not for me to come right out and beg you to tell me what happened? Did I make too big an ass of myself? Or do I just pretend, oh well, oops, a chapter got ripped from my book."

I get a second laugh from Jerry, still far from warm, but he tells me. Because he wants us to be friends. I glare at my reflection: Cold day in hell.

We were out to dinner in Boston, eating at a sidewalk table, when a panhandling gypsy offered to read my palm. Jerry had been waiting all week -- a coward, he admits -- to tell me about this woman he ran into, someone he knew in college. The gypsy gave him the only chance he saw. And you know what's weird? Unlike all the things about my lost month that I have to fish from other people, the encounter with the gypsy I reel back in, here and now, on my own. Like some archetype who's shown up in too many dreams, she wore the gold hoops, the garish peasant textiles, smelled too perfectly of garlic -- the only glitch her local, car salesman accent. "A world explora" were her first words. "I see you in Africa, hon, I see you in Java, I see you with the Eskimos way up nawth. I see you everywaya." She didn't say how she could draw this travelogue from my cupped hand in hers, but I didn't mind.

"And love, love, love. Hon, I see a tapestry of love. Hahtbreak, flirtations, wild lee-ay-zones, marriage, the gamut." I smiled at Jerry when she said this. "See any offspring?" I asked, and I can imagine the goading edge to my voice. The gypsy shook her head. "Can't see it clearly, hon. A toss-up. But see heeya?" She twisted my hand toward the candle and jabbed my palm with a long sharp nail. "Middla the life line, a break." I leaned in, my hair mingling with hers. She was right. A miniature chasm, bisecting the line.

"What does it mean?"

She shrugged. "Could be a crisis, I nevva lie. A serious accident. Loss of a deeya one. Your house burnin' down. But see heeya, the line goes on? Resurrection. A second wind." She stood up and readjusted her shawl. "Time waits for no man. No woman neitha." Without a wave or a nod, as if the prophecies ticked like minutes off a meter and my dime had run out, she walked on down the street, turning the nearest corner.

"A big crisis? That's easy," I said to Jerry. "The day you leave me." The copper light from the candle made me happy, the way it flickered so fondly through his red beard. I was feeling romantic, smiling like a fool. I was a fool.
Jerry stared into the candle as well, but the glow it cast on his face did not illuminate a look of romance. "I'm sorry to be such an ass," he said, "but I've got to put this on hold."

"This? What do you mean by 'this'?"

"Us," he said sheepishly.

That's when he told me about the woman, and that's when I told him no one was putting me "on hold," like some alternative phone call. I don't remember that whole conversation (who'd want to?), but now, as he tells me his side of the story, I remember the wildfire racing through my limbs as I fled down the sidewalk and, not long after, the even hotter rage when I discovered, clamoring through my purse in South Station, that the gypsy, that bitch, had lifted my wallet.

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