Try to remember, walk back to when it began. Paul at crack of day, eyes heavy, coffee, oatmeal, stocks and sports, her note on the counter. Childish hand, like his own mother's: “Test today, off early. Remind Mom about staying the night—Erica.” And when Maggie asked, he could not recall the name of the family where she was staying. One of her friends from school, the chewing-gum girl. When pressed for details, he could not picture a face. Exasperated, Margaret went to bed without him. And then the cycle begins, walking through his day, steady stream of patients at his practice, moving from examining room to examining room. A chart. Eyes, ears, throat, say aah, take a deep breath, good, another, so many beating hearts begin to sound alike. A day like every day, people anxious to tell or hide their problems, bodies moving through time, the bright advance, the dark decline. When does it break down, this getting old, when do we rest from our aging?
Paul sat in the darkened living room counting remembered patients, hours after his wife had fallen asleep. Like sheep, children by the dozens, earaches passed among classmates, or sibling to sibling, a river of bacteria. One punctured eardrum as rank as death. Baby with colic, young mother worn and jumpy. Fear for that child, that woman. He remembered a boy who every semester came to school all black and blue, bruised as overripe fruit. The father and mother taking turns. The nuns who brought him in wanted the parents arrested but those days were so different. Farmer with shingles, a constellation on his back. Salesman who could not outtalk cigarettes. Mrs. Day and her migraines and nightmares. Miss Jankowski: this small lump, here doctor, feel it. Nothing more than a milk gland, but still, a referral to ease her mind. Breast no bigger than an apricot. Eve Fallon worried that she was infertile, trying for years, frightened that he might leave if they don't get that baby so long awaited. Arthritic woman his own age, nothing to be done, the inevitable. And I seem to be forgetting the simplest things, he says to himself, but not the past. Just the other day he thought, for the first time in decades, of the playhouse in the woods where his sister Janie and he would hide and use the doll's china dishes. Pinecones and needles on the plates, water drawn from a cold stream and served in fragile porcelain cups small as thimbles. And he could easily call up the face of a little girl dying in Japan at the end of the war. But where have I put my glasses, the keys, the grocery list, my new friend's name? Where have I put my mind?
His own father, born of another, more stalwart century, spent most of his life clenched and stoic, but the end, the end in madness. Senility. Did not recognize anyone in the last days, brothers and sisters around the bed, the June birds singing at daybreak, look of sheer terror at the strangers in his room. His own children. Am I going this way?
Paul could not remember what his daughter had said. I'll be spending the night tomorrow at… what was the name? A color, yes. Red, no, nobody's last name is Red. Brown? White? Black? Try to form her face as she says it. Nothing but a jaw working the chewing gum. Sometimes he cannot remember what Erica looks like as a teenage girl, cannot reconstruct her features in the haze of his imagination. How long had it been since he had really looked and taken in all the changes, the woman she was becoming? Much better when they are young, when love is so much clearer. Too hard these days, and it comes back to him, her head bent, lifting, hair parting, her eyes, her smile. Had she smiled at him when she said the name? Yes, Green. Joyce Green, that's it. He uncapped his fountain pen and wrote the name on a prescription pad so that he would remember it in the morning and not forget to tell Margaret. Must talk with Erica when she comes home, about the boy, maybe I am being too harsh.
The windows rattled. He pried himself from the easy chair and went to look out, peering past his reflection at the waxing quarter moon floating in the cloudy sky. A cold front had been promised, and here it was, pushing high winds ahead, bending treetops and scattering leaves. “Hold on to your feathers,” he said, just as he had repeated for so many years when the wind blew up in Erica's company. Not lately, but when she was young, she would laugh each time, neither of them certain of the maxim's meaning or significance. He could see her now, in his arms a child of two or three, the happy surprise of the wind startling her as she breathed it in, the flushed cheeks, delight in her eyes, and she burying her face in the crook of his neck. “Hold on to your feathers,” he said, “or you will fly away.” Paul Quinn took one last look at the moon, the stars, and the streaming clouds before climbing the stairs one by one to his bed.
8
In the parking lot of Bearden High School in west Knoxville, they watched the juniors and seniors drive back from lunch. Wiley had already switched their Pennsylvania tags with a set from Tennessee, which he held in his lap, tapping his nails against the raised metal letters. They waited for some student to make a mistake. From the passenger seat, Erica noticed the boys in their Bulldog jackets, the girls neat and perfect, walking like fashion models back to their classes. Or gaggles of friends excitedly sharing the latest gossip, goofballs horsing around, hoods smoking joints or cigarettes. A pair roared in on a motorcycle, the boy in black leather, the girl's long brown hair trailing like a horsetail.
“Look at them,” Wiley said. “Clueless rich kids.”
“I remember the first time I saw you in high school. Squirt, always had your head in a book.”
“Come the day, they won't be ready.”
“What'd they call you? Little Mao? ‘Dare to struggle, dare to win.’ “