Marcus nodded. "I remember. Bobbie was the only person Robert Morgan wasn"t able to treat." He hesitated a moment and then went ahead and asked what he real y wanted to. "But what about you? Is he stil sticking you ful of needles, Truly? Is he writing up files on you? I know how much you hate that."
I didn"t say anything.
"Why did you let him start?" Marcus said.
"Why don"t you just tel him no?"
Because if I did, I might die, I wanted to say, and I"m not ready to go yet. I waved a hand. "It doesn"t matter. It gives the old coot something to do.
Besides, it"s never good to cross him." I didn"t know how to explain Robert Morgan"s temper to Marcus. It wasn"t the bl.u.s.tery, volatile kind that blew itself up like a thunderstorm, but more sinister and steady, the north wind trailing its ribbons of frost and ice.
Once provoked, his rage might linger for days, chil ing everything around him, dropping temperatures until it hurt to breathe. I"d seen him go temperatures until it hurt to breathe. I"d seen him go after the patients who were late with payments, and he wasn"t kidding. The north wind always meant business.
Just then, I noticed that Marcus, who was so smal that he never had to look anyone in the eye if he didn"t want to, was staring at me as if I were the sun come out after the Ice Age. Fl.u.s.tered, I smoothed a strand of hair behind one of my ears.
Marcus reached up to my cheek and cupped it with his bad hand. I was surprised that I couldn"t feel his scars. His breath lingered between us. "What if it was just us here?" he asked, his voice low. "What would you do then?"
I shook my head.
"Come on, Truly, haven"t you ever wondered what it would be like?"
My skin was on fire. I cleared my throat.
"That"s ridiculous. We"re polar opposites, for one thing. Salt and pepper. Water and dirt."
Marcus sighed and took his fingers away from my cheek. Immediately, I missed them. "So?
Who says al the lines of love are supposed to match up?" I"d never thought about it that way before-that maybe your perfect other wasn"t everything you already were, but everything you were never going to be. Marcus scuffed his boot on the floor. "You"re not ready to hear this."
"No."
He pul ed his hat back on his head, then his gloves, hand by hand, not looking at me. "I"l go, then. You know where I"l be." He opened the door, letting in flurries of snow.
After he left, I saw that he had left his plans on the table, so I unrol ed them, careful y, tenderly, and stared at the penciled whorls and arcs.
As far as I could tel , he wanted to plant vegetables in the beds by the back fence in an oddly beautiful, spiral pattern. He wanted to dig up a line of hedges and put in maize. He wanted to try cultivating a pear tree. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the papery sound of corn leaves rustling messages in the dark. I pictured Marcus"s strong bare back bending over a bed of raw earth, and then I envisioned globes of fruit hanging on a branch at dusk, pale as moonstones, heavy as babies waiting to be born.
"What are you looking at?" Bobbie had come in the kitchen without me hearing him.
"Nothing." I quickly rol ed the plans back up. "Just something from Marcus."
"Let me see."
"No." I pul ed the plans closer to my chest. "They"re nothing. Just some ideas he had for the garden." Marcus"s words were stil shimmering in my head, however, like tentative bubbles.
"Come on, what"s the big deal?" Bobbie stuck out his arm. It was as stark as a pylon, with milky skin. Each month, it seemed, Bobbie was getting thinner and paler. For the life of me, I couldn"t figure out why Robert Morgan hadn"t hauled him into his office for a battery of tests and shots the way he did me, but for some reason, things were different with his own flesh and blood. Marcus was right.
Robert Morgan never had been able to treat Bobbie.
They went to see a doctor in Hansen instead.
I looked up and saw that Bobbie"s eyebrows had turned into two angry slants, just like his father"s, and for the first time, I was a little afraid of him. Maybe I"d made a mistake, I thought, never tel ing him no, always giving him what he wanted al these years, keeping the secret of what was going on in the attic for him.
His lips stretched over his teeth in perfect imitation of his father, and suddenly I realized where I"d gone wrong with him. It was something I should have known better, me of al people, something I didn"t see until right that moment, but it was plain as day: Bobbie was like a lopsided equation. The inside of him didn"t match the outside of him. He had Serena Jane"s nose, Serena Jane"s blue eyes, her lips, and her cheeks, but somehow, when you added al the features together, you stil ended up with one more Robert Morgan. It was amazing, I thought. Maybe biology real y was destiny.
I took a step back, stil clutching the plans. "They"re real y not very interesting. Why don"t you sit down, and I"l make you some eggs?"
He s.n.a.t.c.hed the scrol away from me before I had time to object and opened it. He blinked down at the plans, disappointed. "Oh, you"re right.
They are boring. Everything"s boring." He tossed the plans aside and slumped into a chair while I went to the stove and started his breakfast.
"Wel , I expect al that wil change next year when you"re studying medicine at Buffalo, like year when you"re studying medicine at Buffalo, like your father did. You"l be too busy to be bored."
Bobbie snorted. "Yeah, right, like they"l accept me with my grades."
"They"l take you. They have to take you.
Four generations of your family have gone there.
Every Robert Morgan in this family has graduated a doctor, and you wil , too." In the pan, the eggs shimmered like giant knowing eyes. I broke the yolks and turned down the heat. "After al , your father won"t be around forever. He"l need you to take his place one day."
Bobbie shook his head. "That"s never going to happen."
I considered Bobbie"s shadow-ringed eyes, his wil owy neck and wrists, the bony shoulders hunched under his T-shirt. He looked as if he were half skeleton, like a specimen to be studied. I couldn"t imagine him sequestered in a morgue, puzzling over the contents of the human body, but I supposed he would do it. Al the Morgan men did.
"Don"t be sil y." I poured out two gla.s.ses of orange juice. "Here, a toast to the bright path of the future Dr. Morgan." Bobbie sul enly clinked gla.s.ses with me and sulked, not looking at al certain that such a road led anywhere he was wil ing to fol ow.
That night, Bobbie woke with an erection so powerful, it was almost painful. He hobbled out of bed, grasping at himself, but his p.e.n.i.s refused to deflate. He released it, and it sprang upright again, defying him. He removed his boxer shorts and stared at himself in his dresser mirror. Everything else on him-his hips, his long slender thighs, the dips and hol ows in his chest-was supple and smooth, until he got to the nest of hair between his legs and the cylinder of flesh throbbing out of it. It wasn"t that he was particularly wel endowed (at least, he didn"t think he was); it was merely the fact that the thing existed at al .
He ran his hands through his hair and sighed. In the spring, he would be required to walk down aisles of folding chairs with a sil y cap on his head and col ect a rol ed-up diploma-an event for which he was none too eager. Robert Morgan and I would arrive late, he knew, and shove into the back of the auditorium, where his father would glower at Bobbie, p.i.s.sed that he hadn"t even come close to being valedictorian, and I would heave myself to half standing, waving.
We would take posed photographs and mil around, and then we would al come back to the house and eat platters of food that had gone half-cold. Without warning, as quickly as it arrived, his erection disappeared, and Bobbie sighed with relief.
Stil naked, he ruffled his hair. Over the past few weeks, to his father"s intense annoyance, he"d been growing it. Little tendrils were starting to sprout down over his ears, fluffing around his jaw, softening it. It looked almost gamine. But not over the stern lapels of a blue blazer. Not over the regulated stripes of the necktie he would be required to wear at fraternity mixers in col ege.
He pul ed his boxers back on, then a T- shirt, and opened his closet. There, nestled in the very back against his winter coat, was his mother"s blue dress. He pushed the other clothing aside and blue dress. He pushed the other clothing aside and stroked the silky fabric of the skirt, ran a thumb along the sweetheart neckline. If he put his nose to the material and breathed deeply enough, he knew, he would stil find a musty scent buried in the threads.
He slipped the dress off its hanger and slid it on over his head, savoring the cool lick of the garment against his bare skin. He turned back to the mirror, and his cheeks flushed with pleasure. If only he could prolong this moment, Bobbie thought, stretching the secret hours of night out long and thin enough that a few tendrils might remain with him in the day. So often, we believe we are alone in the privacy of our fantasies, but that is a delusion as wel -and perhaps the most dangerous kind. For in letting ourselves forget about the common threads of our innermost wishes, we erode our foundations and lose the keystone of our souls.
Bobbie remembered only fragments of his mother. Her dusky hair tickling his cheek. The press of her lips against his neck when she tucked him into bed. The musical clicking that the heels of her shoes made on the parquet floors, a sound he could never reproduce no matter how hard he tried.
At the edge of the cemetery, in a little clearing by the west fence, her square granite headstone squatted -a deliberately ugly memorial chosen by Robert Morgan, carved with the bluntest letters possible, plain in the extreme. On the afternoon of Serena Jane"s burial, the sun was high and bright, Bobbie remembered, but the wind was already fil ed with a bitterness so mean, it dried his tears before they formed.
"May she rest in peace," the Reverend Pickerton had whispered, ashen around the lips.
"Amen," Robert Morgan had spat through gritted teeth.
After that afternoon, we rarely visited, but I can only give you the reason for my own absence.
Even when we were supposedly laying my sister in the ground, her grave seemed anonymous to me-a rectangular hol ow that would stil be empty after it was fil ed. Once a year, I went to lay flowers on my mother"s and father"s graves, but I avoided Serena Jane"s altogether. I simply missed her too much.
Marcus told me he weeded around the stone regularly and that noisy crows liked to perch on the top of it. "I don"t know why," he reported, "but they always go for that one spot. You don"t normal y see them do that."
Maybe it was the image of his mother"s dress clinging around his shoulders, or maybe it was the culmination of years of missing his mother, but at that moment, Bobbie suddenly determined that Serena Jane"s grave was the one and only spot in the world he wanted to be. He slipped out of the house without anyone hearing him-his overcoat bundled over his mother"s dress, boots stil unlaced.
The frosty air stung his bare calves and thighs, but he didn"t notice. The anemic moon il uminated his trail of footsteps, lonely little cavities chipped in the snow, close together at first and then strung out farther and farther apart until they lost their form completely. In the tottering house on Conifer Street- the house of his father and al the Dr. Morgans before him-Robert Morgan and I slept, gnashing our teeth, unaware that the chain of history had just been broken and a new thread of events, one we couldn"t control, had begun.
Part Three.
Chapter Twenty-three.
Sometimes I think I col ect souls to make up for the ones I"ve lost over the course of my life-the string of disappearances that started with my mother and spread outward like a raven"s wing, darkening everything beneath it. Sometimes it"s possible to see misfortune coming and prepare for it, I guess, but most of the time, when a person disappears, it"s as unexpected and shocking as hail in the middle of June.
Bobbie never came back from the cemetery to his father"s house. Instead, Marcus rang the front doorbel the next morning and kept his eyes lowered when I answered the door, twirling his hat in his hands. "Why, Marcus," I exclaimed, throwing open the screen, "come on in. Are you here to argue your garden some more?" I was surprised to see him at the front door. Normal y he just came to the kitchen.
Marcus wouldn"t look at me. He"s mad, I thought, because he tried to say he loved me and I couldn"t say it back yet. But I was working on it. I couldn"t say it back yet. But I was working on it. I thought I might be able to say it one day. Maybe even sooner rather than later.
"I need to speak to Robert Morgan."
I shut the door. "I"l go get him. But, Marcus..." Now I was the one who couldn"t look up.
"About the things you said to me last-"
Marcus waved a hand. "They"l wait. Just go get Robert Morgan. Please. It"s important."
"What"s the matter? Is everything okay?"
Marcus rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"It"s about Bobbie. I found him out in the graveyard this morning, sitting on Serena Jane"s grave. What"s going on with him?"
I put a hand to my heart, remembering how I"d needled him about his educational plans. In some ways, I thought, he real y was stil a boy. Even though his future was bearing down on him, he stil had both feet in the past. Suddenly I felt guilty. I looked at Marcus"s patient but questioning eyes and found I couldn"t hold his gaze. "I"l fetch the doctor.
You wait in the kitchen," I said, and bustled off to find Robert Morgan in his office.
"What"s the problem?" Robert Morgan cool y examined me over the tops of his bifocals.
They were new and made him look even more medicinal, I thought.
"Something about Bobbie. Marcus is in the kitchen. He"l explain."
Robert Morgan scowled, but he put down his pen, grabbed his doctor"s kit, and fol owed me across to where Marcus was waiting, tapping his good foot.
"Don"t worry. He"s at my place. He"s fine," Marcus began, "but I thought you should know, I found him sitting on his mother"s grave. He"d been out there al night."
The doctor cut right to the point. "Was he drunk?"
"No. Not that I know of. In fact, I think he was clear as a bel ."
"Wel , thank goodness for that. Although, between you and me, it wouldn"t be the first time a Morgan man tied one on." I could hear the wink and nudge in the doctor"s voice, but Marcus ignored it.
"Listen, I don"t know how to tel you this, exactly, but Bobbie wasn"t- isn"t-himself."
Al the humor left Robert Morgan. "What do you mean?"
"Wel , for one thing, when I found him, he was wearing a dress."
There was wool y silence for a moment, and when Robert Morgan final y spoke again, it was in such a low voice, I had trouble hearing him. "Did anyone else see him?"
"No, it was too early. Just barely dawn."
"And where is he now?"
"In my cottage. Sleeping."
Another pause, then, "Good, that"s good.
I"l give you some clothes to take back to him. And here..." Robert Morgan fumbled in his doctor"s bag and shook a series of pil s out of a plastic bottle.
"When he wakes up, give him two of these. Give him the pil s first, then the clothes. Wait about twenty minutes in between."
There was a stretch of silence. My heart hammered in my chest as I wondered what Marcus would say. Would he stash the pil s in his jacket pocket, no questions asked, or hesitate, his palm half- uncurled? I guessed right. Marcus shook his head firmly, his eyes cast down to his boots, but resolute. "No sir," he said. "I don"t think that"s the right answer."
Robert Morgan glowered and closed his fingers tighter around the pil s. "With al due respect, he"s my son. I get to cal the shots here."
But Marcus wouldn"t be moved. "I guess we"l just have to agree to disagree, then. I"m not giving him those pil s."
The doctor sputtered, "You can"t just let Bobbie stay with you. I"l cal the police."
Marcus folded his arms across his chest.
"Didn"t Bobbie turn eighteen two months ago?"
Robert Morgan sputtered again, and Marcus put his hat on his head. "Like I said, I guess we"l just have to agree to disagree."
Before he could open the door, however, Robert Morgan slammed his hand against it. "Know this. When you walk out that door, you are finished in this house. If you ever set foot on my property again, I"l have you arrested."
Marcus shrugged. The doctor"s face turned a dangerous puce. "You were a little s.h.i.t growing up, Thompson, and you"re stil a little s.h.i.t now. No war wound is going to change that."
I sucked in my breath. It was the worst, I sucked in my breath. It was the worst, meanest thing Robert Morgan could possibly say. A gust of wind kicked up outside, rattling dead tree twigs, and it was a final sound, empty and dul . To his credit, Marcus kept his cool. "You can insult me al you want, Bob Bob, but it isn"t going to change the finer points of your son. I guess I"l see myself out the front." Marcus twirled his hat once more, glanced at me for a moment, and shook his head. It was enough for me to understand that he was saying good-bye.