Cygnet Read online

  Plus it’s a nice day. Being cooped up in here too long can get me down.

  I’m not really hungry anyway, so I go to the Oceanic to see the Duchess. The Oceanic used to be a hotel, back when people would come out to the Shoals on vacation, before World War One or something. A couple of retired doctors and three retired nurses live here along with six Swans who might be in nursing homes if they still lived on the mainland. Johnny and Suzie Q call it Stairway to Heaven. It’s small for a hotel, and it’s peaceful; the lawn tilts slowly downward and the grass recedes until it becomes a thick forehead of beach. Some red-bottomed rowboats are stacked upside down next to a big coil of rope. It’s like a picture; it’s really pretty and it feels like I’m not actually here. This is where Lolly died.

  Everyone at the Oceanic can get around on their own; they just need someone close, just in case. Except the Duchess. She has Alzheimer’s and it’s gotten bad. It was already pretty awful when I got here six months ago. She thought I was the daughter of the maid she had when she was a kid. I walked past the porch one day—the Oceanic has this big porch that wraps all the way around three sides of the building, super-broad with lots of rocking chairs, so the Swans can rock and stare at the sea. Anyway, I was walking past and she called out to one of the nurses, “There’s my friend. Mabel’s little girl. She comes to play with me.” So I came up and sat next to her and let her talk. She asked me questions, too, but she didn’t always understand the answers. Sometimes she just smiled and looked out at the waves; sometimes she corrected me. Like when she asked what grade I was in and I told her that I didn’t go to school anymore, but I should be a senior, she went, “No, that’s not right. You’re in the same grade as me, but you go to the Negro school.” And I’m thinking, wow, you’re fucking old.

  I kind of played along after that, like a game of let’s pretend whose rules I had to keep guessing at. I asked her what her teacher’s name was and which girls she played with. Eventually I came up with some really great stuff, like asking her if she had a TV (I even called it a television set, really old-fashioned because as far as she was concerned, on that day at least, both of us were ten and it was nineteen-forty-something). And she knew all the answers to everything I asked. She told me how her teacher wore her hair—parted on the side with her bangs swept over her forehead and pinned onto her temple, with the rest braided into a complicated bun at the base of her skull—and that she’d wear it the same way when she grew up. She told me that Jimmy O’Malley would bring a cigarette he’d taken from his mother’s purse and smoke it after school. The girls all thought he was disgusting because stealing is a sin and you shouldn’t smoke until you’re in high school. I asked what she thought of the moon landing and she giggled and said she thought only boys read space comics.

  On the day I met her she was wearing a pink dress with burgundy flowers on it. And her hair was just like she described her teacher’s. Except that her teacher’s hair was golden and the Duchess’s was silver.

  She makes me want to remember things, which isn’t always nice, to be honest, but it feels like the right thing to do. It feels like the only thing I can do for her.

  After a couple of months she changed, though, and it was a toss-up whether she’d be happy to see me—smiling or doing this giggle that made me think of gingerbread, I don’t know why. Or whether she’d be terrified, convinced I’d come to steal things from her. She’d cry and wail and throw things at me until I left. Or whether she’d ignore me completely.

  On good days we would go for walks or sit together on the porch of the Oceanic. She had this funny habit where she made wishes over everything. If a red bird flew by or a boat went past. Sunsets, rainbows, if I stumbled over the doorjamb of the entryway. Her wishes were always different—good weather tomorrow, someone to bring her treats, health for someone in her family, for her baby sister to go to heaven or for her baby sister to come back (she died of tuberculosis when she was six and the Duchess was eight), for the war to end. Mine was always the same until one day she asked, “Is that really what you want?” I told her it was what I needed, and so what was the point bothering God or the universe or whatever for anything else?

  “But what do you want? You must want something, even some little thing?” I thought about the world, the future. Beached whales, people in surgical masks walking along highways bathed in smog, tap water you can set on fire. Waiting in line outside a football stadium with my folks for someone to look at our teeth, waiting in line outside a church for groceries, waiting here . . . I told her I couldn’t think of anything.

  “Then you’ll never get anything, silly.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t work like that.”

  She brushed her fingers across my forehead and the front of my hair. “I wish you could be less afraid. Just a little less. Come ’ere, I have an idea.” A grin crinkled up around her dark brown eyes, and she led me up to her room faster than I’d ever seen her move before. Her hand clamped enthusiastically around my wrist was girlishly small.

  She led me over to her dresser and pulled a little red change purse out of her top drawer. “Here.” She pressed a coin into my palm. “It’s a real Indian Head penny. For courage, like a brave.”

  I was relieved she stopped there and didn’t make any embarrassing noises with her hand over her mouth like she did sometimes when she thought we were kids playing.

  I was torn between playing along and wanting to avoid her finding it missing and accusing me of having taken it, especially because she would have been half right. “I can’t take your lucky penny.”

  “But aren’t we friends?”

  “I . . . I have a hole in my pocket. It’ll fall out on my way home. Will you keep it safe for me and I’ll come back and get it tomorrow?”

  I could say that because neither of us really knew what “tomorrow” meant. She beamed at the responsibility.

  That night she had the first stroke. Rose told me it wasn’t too bad, and when I came to visit I found her sitting up with her eyes open wide, like she was looking at something she couldn’t quite believe. Her eyes darted to me in the doorway and followed me as I settled into the chair next to her.

  “It’s just so sad about the teacher.” Her sigh was almost a groan. Her wrinkles all sank downward, like she was disappointed in God.

  “Your teacher?”

  “I don’t know what they wanted to go to space for anyway. Why can’t anyone just stay here? Just stay, just stay.”

  Nothing I said would get through. Helen and Nancy came later and said she must be talking about a space shuttle that had exploded, sometime before I was born. Like she was stuck on that event and couldn’t stop reliving it. “What’s a school teacher need to go to space for, anyway? Why didn’t she just stay here? Just stay . . .”

  Her second stroke followed just two days later and the Swans had a meeting in the chapel.

  I walk up the big staircase that leads to the porch and the entrance to the Oceanic. It’s almost grand, as grand as Shaker buildings can be, I suppose. Lots of space and air and light. The foyer has high ceilings, a wood floor, and white walls that make the room feel comforting instead of sterile. Gretchen comes out of one of the ground-floor rooms, the one they use for checkups and stuff. She’s not technically a youngster, but she’s only seventy-one. She moved here with a much older guy she was seeing. He died in the Oceanic two years ago. That’s what Rose told me, and she knows everything about everyone on Swan.

  “All right, lovely? Here to visit the Duchess?”

  I nod. “Can I do anything, help with anything?”

  As usual, Gretchen considers my offer seriously. She ducks into her office for a moment and comes back with a tiny pair of spring-loaded scissors. “Her nails are getting a bit long. Be careful.”

  “I know.” As if I would hurt her. I would never.

  The Duchess lives in room sixteen, just at the top of the first flight of stairs. She hasn’t done anything for a long time. She can’t eat anymore. She can’t m
ove. For a while after the second stroke, she’d make sounds, almost words sometimes. Then she’d move her mouth and shake her head like she was trying to wake herself up from a nightmare. Now she doesn’t even do that. She made it clear—back when she could still make things clear—that she didn’t want to be kept alive in a “vegetative state” and that this is where she wanted to die. The Swans are having a meeting on Sunday to decide how to kill her. Rose says I can’t come.

  Her room is light. They put her bed by the big window but it’s not like she can turn her head to enjoy the view. Some things we do are to make things easier for the person in pain and other things are to make it easier for the people who love them. They always keep fresh flowers in her room, lilacs today. They’re really perfume-y and they’re making me feel a bit high.

  “Hi. It’s me. It’s my lunch hour.” Talking aloud when no one hears you makes everything sound really loud. But it doesn’t matter. I put my stuff down at the foot of the bed and take her hands into mine. They’re so small and almost brown between the dark spots and the tape that holds her IV needle in place. And so delicate it’s almost hard to touch them, like they’re made of warm water or glass that’s not quite set. There’s a flat brown mole on the fleshy part below her right thumb that I never noticed before. I check that no one’s in the doorway before I give it a tiny kiss. Then I start clipping.

  “It finally stopped raining. It’s hot today, hardly any clouds.” The clock on the wall clacks. The machine that monitors her heart beeps in horrible syncopation with the clock. The machine that breathes for her sucks and drops, a blue accordion in a tube. The snap of the nail clippers sends sharp crescents flying onto the bedspread or the floor. She’s still growing, even now, still doing something all on her own. But it’s nothing to get all optimistic about. It doesn’t mean anything.

  I gather up the clippings and take them to the trash can. On the shelf above it there’s a bottle of hand sanitizer that I forgot to use before I cut her nails. We’ll just keep this between us. I sit in the chair next to her bed, pick up the book I’ve been reading to her, and start where I left off yesterday:

  When someone sleeps they become a child again, perhaps because in sleep one can do no evil and one is unaware even of one’s own existence. By some natural magic, the worst criminal, the most inveterate egoist is made sacred by sleep.

  After I’ve been here for nearly an hour, I stop reading and look at her, lying in bed, existing. Her crocheted beige slippers are still under her bed, even though she’ll never use them again. She’s going to die very soon.

  The clack of the wall clock tears gristle apart. Each beep of the heart monitor shrieks alarm. The machine that breathes for her sucks and drops, a blue accordion in a tube, pulling in hard hope, and giving up.

  She has a heart that works, that bleeps the machine and pulls a line across the screen.

  Clack, bleep, suck, drop.

  I am her brain. I can’t tell her race; her skin is worn, brown, seasoned. She could be my grandmother. Her cheekbones are the edge of the cliff. The skin underneath curves in at a dangerous angle, then hollows, soft as soil and brown and ridged and marked. Too much like a skull. Her eyes are closed. Oxygen goes in through the tube taped to her nose. Her mouth open and soundless, letting a draft sweep through the curve of her face.

  Clack, bleep, suck, drop.

  I am her lost mind.

  It’s time to go, but it’s hard to leave the swim of flower smell and the softness of the Duchess’s room, so I read to her, just a little more.

  We sleep our lives away, the eternal children of Fate. That’s why, if I think with that feeling, I experience an immense, boundless tenderness for all of infantile humanity, for the somnambulist lives people lead, for everyone, for everything.

  “Aha!” Gretchen’s voice from the doorway stabs the silence. “I’ve figured out her game. She finds the most depressing book on the island, recites a little every day in that lugubrious tone you can’t really strike after adolescence. All us Wrinklies slide into comas as well, and the island’s all hers.”

  Gretchen and Frances, one of the nurses, are giving me little teasing grins. “Quick, Dr. Diaz,” Frances gasps. “Take my pulse. I think my will to live is still hanging on by a thread.”

  “We’ve got your number, junior.”

  “Devious shit, kid.”

  If I were holding Storytime, I would have brought juice boxes and rung the bell. Sorry, I don’t take requests, but if you don’t like what I’m reading you could always try, I don’t know, not mooching in doorways listening to private conversations like an analogue NSA. You probably expect me to read a bunch of lovely stuff, Celia Thaxter poetry or, like, Wordsworth or Emerson or whatever. Well, fuck that. I’ll read what I want.

  Of course, I can’t say any of this aloud. I talk back and the next thing I know they’ve told Rose and she’s giving me one of her talks about respect for your elders and no one likes a smart-ass and you’re a guest here, young lady, and your behavior should reflect that. I’m not even a guest. I’m as much of a guest here as a crack baby in a hospital dumpster.

  “It’s those pesky overactive libidos.”

  “Thank God that’s over.”

  “Speaking of libidos, what day is it?”

  “Why,” Frances puts on fake surprise. “I do believe it’s Friday. First one of the month, in fact.”

  “Already? I wonder who Ted will row over this month.”

  I mark my page with the leaf I’ve been using and gather up my bag, fighting off the massive smile Gretchen and Frances planted there.

  I hand the nail scissors back to Gretchen and they let me by. “Um, thanks.” It seems like the polite thing since I don’t know what else to say.

  “See you tonight,” Frances chants after me.

  First Friday of the month. I completely forgot. I take out my phone; I put it on silent when I got to the Oceanic. One missed call. Jason.

  Chapter Three

  It’s late, almost quarter past two, and I’m running again, past the clumps of long, pale grass bent from how the wind’s always bothering them. It’s hot. My underarms are all itchy. I shouldn’t be nervous about Jason coming but I can’t help it. Little e-fiend butterflies are having a sweaty rave in my stomach as I climb the hill. Jesus, it got really hot. And what am I wearing? It doesn’t matter. I don’t even look right in my own clothes, so I might as well look wrong in Lolly’s. I consider stopping to call Jason back—I’m already late; two more minutes won’t make a difference—but I’d rather call when I’ve gotten my breath back and I’m less at risk of sounding like someone’s asthmatic phone stalker.

  Mrs. Tyburn is at the kitchen table looking through the Sotheby’s catalog. She glances at her watch when I walk in. She won’t say anything if I stay a little late tonight.

  “Pleasant lunch?”

  “Yeah. I went to the Oceanic to read to the Duchess for a bit.”

  She smiles and sort of coos at me.

  Just then her eyes move, and mine follow. Up, then quickly left and right. There’s a noise, a long scratch. Now it’s gone, and in a second it’s back again. When the pitch changes from low to irritatingly high, I can see it. Our eyes meet as it flies between us and then shoot up as it makes for the ceiling. It hovers back down again in a quick zigzag and lands on the edge of the table near the sugar dish. Mrs. Tyburn squints, then moves so fast it makes me flinch.

  It’s like an igloo exploded—white cubes in the air, scattering across the table and onto the floor. I manage to catch the sugar dish before it falls and shatters. I start picking up the glittering cubes from the tabletop and when Mrs. Tyburn moves the catalog I spot the little body.

  “Got it.”

  Just. She whacked the catalog down when it was on the very edge of the table; it almost got away. Another inch or two and she would have made it. Her wings twitch against the stripy fur on her back.

  “Why did you do that?” The words feel cold when they slip out of me.
/>   “It was a bug.”

  “It was a bee.”

  Mrs. Tyburn turns her face away from me and kind of scratches her ear. “I suppose they are lovely little furry things.”

  “Get a hundred more and you can make yourself a coat.”

  It looks like she’s trying to change her facial expression but can’t quite make her muscles hit the mark, so I can’t tell if she’s angry or confused. You’re, like, a million years old, I want to say to her. What is Botox supposed to do, make you look half a million?

  Because she’s my boss, because she’s old and I’m not, because I’d rather face the floor than look at her, because there’s a mess now and someone’s got to clean it, I go get the dustpan and the tiny broom out from under the sink and sweep her floor.

  “Did you manage the rest of the corrections to Sophia’s diary?” I nod and try to soften up my face. “Very good. Let’s have a look at Herbert’s vexing little boat, shall we?”

  I hate climbing the stairs with her. It makes me feel like I’m being punished. I like it better when we talk in the kitchen and I’m left to go upstairs on my own and get on with things. It’s excruciating, having to walk up three stories at her old lady pace, nothing to say to each other, up to my too-new room in the attic. Plus I’m still pissed off about the bee. You can’t kill bees anymore. Everybody knows that. I keep telling myself that one isn’t going to make a difference, but instead of making me calmer, I think it’s making me more angry—they’re fucking endangered, for Christ’s sake! The entire goddamn food chain’s going to collapse but what does that matter to Grandma Moneybags?