Her initial response did nothing to reverse his self-consciousness. She lay back in bed, absorbed in a rerun of Family Feud on the wall-mounted television, and, when she recognized that Eddie had entered the room, she raised herself slightly with the automatic button by her side and shimmied into an upright position, stiffening her spine. Her body language suggested puzzlement rather than joy.
She glanced at him from beneath lowered eyebrows and said, You couldn’t call?
He stopped at her bedside and laid the flowers on a chair. He rested his metal prostheses against the bars at the foot of the bed, making a noise like a service bell. For an instant, the festive atmosphere on Mindy’s side of the room caught his eye again. Mindy herself lay on her left side, face toward the window in a patch of sun, peroxide-blond hair brilliantly glistening in the light, snoring like the engine of a small car. His eyes returned to his mother and he focused on the distance between his mechanical pincers and the bare soles of her feet. He could already feel himself becoming angry at the thought that she might turn him away after he had made so much effort to see her, but the glance at the other side of the room had reminded him of Darlene’s loneliness, and he thought that she might not decide to send him away for failing to announce his arrival if he could find a way to cure that loneliness without calling any attention to it.
I did, he told her, choosing his words carefully, but no one picked up the phone.
Oh, she said. Well, then. I’m glad you’re here, but I didn’t want anybody to see me this way. This is not ideal. Without moving, she indicated with her attitude that it would be okay for him to approach and sit beside her, and that while she might not approve of him interrupting the television, which had switched to Jeopardy!, they might begin to have an elementary conversation.
Eddie edged his way to the chair by the side of the bed and sat in it at what he determined was a comfortable distance. I heard what happened, he said. You’re feeling better. He realized that he’d sat on the flowers, and he raised himself on his haunches enough to move them to the nightstand. A few of the blooms were still intact.
She laughed, and through her laughter asked him not to make her laugh because laughing hurt. If I started feeling worse, I would’ve died, Eddie. The statement did not strike Eddie as humorous but bitterly true. He felt guilty that he’d destroyed the daffodils. He watched the television and said nothing for a few moments to allow the moment to pass.
Your smile’s looking good! he told her.
She brightened up and demonstrated her restored teeth. Why, thank you! she said. You came all the way from Minnesota. Where’s the family?
They stayed back. It seemed like the best idea.
Because why? Darlene asked. Are you ashamed to—
No, no. Expenses and everything. Ruth’s working, Nat has preschool.
Nat, she said, and when she said the name it sounded to Eddie like she had addressed her husband rather than his son.
She asked when he would let her see young Nat, and while Eddie should’ve expected to hear the question, he found himself caught off guard a second time.
Obviously, she said, I’m not going to be around forever. I might not be around next week. We’re letting too much time go by.
Eddie struggled to find a proper response without lying and once more resorted to silence. There was no way he could try to set guidelines at that point—to do so seemed both premature and overdue, it would be neither useful nor logical. Maybe she had meant to put him on the spot. He could feel it now between them more clearly than ever before in life, an ominous sense of time as an enormous set of gears, each generation interlocking with the ones on either side, all of them forced to react by turning each other in opposite directions.
Occasionally speaking over Alex Trebek, they embarked on a rudimentary, halting conversation about the most recent months of their lives. Darlene emphasized her significant time living clean and sober and incorporated many familiar homilies that she credited with getting her through the roughest parts of her recovery and her new life. Fake it till you make it, she said. One day at a time. She returned so frequently to the principles of the program, in practically the same way she had hewn to the precepts of the book, that Eddie couldn’t help doubting her. Everything she said reminded him of the book, which made him remember the urine-soaked barracks and the sweltering fields of Delicious Foods. Surely she knew the truth, which was that only time could prove she had conquered all of the terrible patterns, the vicious cycles whose pains he could still feel in his phantom fingers.
Remember Sirius B? Darlene suddenly asked.
Not very well, Eddie said. But you were involved with him, weren’t you?
I still daydream about him sometimes, she said.
It seemed like a girlish confession, a chamber of her personality that his mother rarely opened.
He was a very interesting guy, Eddie offered. From what I hear, he’s doing well in the music business.
I did a lot of daydreaming back at Delicious, Darlene said. You had to. Especially in the fields on those details. She didn’t turn away from the TV.
Eddie allowed her to define what she’d done as daydreaming, choosing not to argue. Daydreaming, he thought. If only.
Like everybody, she said, she figured out a way to keep her attention focused just enough to accomplish whatever task she’d been assigned, so that her mind could travel in any direction it pleased even if they would not allow her body to follow. She told Eddie that she often found herself disappearing to a strange episode she had shared with Sirius one diamond-clear evening. The sun had tipped over the horizon and turned the land in the west into a velvet silhouette, while off to the east, the sky had become a navy blue felt blanket shot through with pinholes, all of them mysterious—was each one a distant home? A streetlamp? A high, oblivious airplane? Some celestial event?
We knew without having to be told, Darlene said, that we would have to work overtime, into the night. The managers never turned on the work lights until the very last possible moment. How’s main purpose in life was to make sure Delicious never went over budget.