26.
During an Internet Session in the Hospital, I found a video of my mother talking about the day she almost died. She was diving and rose too quickly. She knew all about decompression sickness, but she saw a spar wedged in a reef of brain coral and she was young and she got excited. During the ascent, her interval stops weren’t long enough. On deck, she knew something was wrong. Her legs felt thick and numb. She heard a strange ringing, like bells were sounding on the ship, and said, “Where are the bells?” Her crew looked at her and turned over their palms, as though to prove they weren’t hiding the sound in their hands. What bells? All she wanted was to lie on the cot in the lower cabin, but she didn’t even make it down the stairs. She slumped against the wall. She clawed at the wood paneling. She wet herself inside her dive suit. She felt a sharp pain in her knees and elbows and in the bones in her feet; the pain spread like a rash, into her hips and spine. They were in the middle of the Atlantic, hundreds of miles off the coast of the Dry Tortugas. She knew how to prevent this, she had been trained, but she had forgotten and now, because of that one mistake, that one moment of forgetting, she was slipping away.
Mud sliding down a mountain in springtime, as Dr. Bek once said, his hands making that little dive.
She remembered the white stretcher that carried her out of the stairwell, the hands that fastened the straps. The circle of freckles, the knuckles soft with hair, the scar on the thenar, the crooked ring finger. All these hands working in harmony, as though they belonged to the same body. The smell of salt.
In her memory, the orange coast guard helicopter was noiseless. She only remembered the water churning white beneath her and the sensation of being lifted and then lifted higher and the ocean looking like an enormous blue disc that stretched on into eternity.
*
In Harrisburg, Marcus gets off the bus with me. He has no place to go. I have no one else to go with. The choice to leave this bus together, to get away from this lost driver, who took all night to find Harrisburg, into the light of the day, is so easy it doesn’t feel like a choice at all.
The morning is pale and cold. All the buses are going west or north; nobody seems to want to go south. When I say “Florida,” the drivers look at me like I’ve asked if a bus can swim across the ocean, if a bus can take us to Hawaii. Finally we get on a bus headed for Charleston, West Virginia. It takes eight hours to get there and by the time this new city is in sight, the afternoon is winding down into dusk.
We pass yet another river, the Kanawha, according to the signs, and a bronze statue of a man with a sword. All cities, I’m learning, are filled with their monuments.
With the money I earned in Kansas City, we get a room at an Econo Lodge. The lobby is cluttered with fake ferns, as though someone wanted to give the appearance of entering a jungle. At the front desk, there is a stack of brochures that tell us about the history of the Econo Lodge. The Econo Lodge was founded in Norfolk, Virginia, by a man named Vernon Myers and his son, Vernon Junior. They were the first motel chain to put beds on boxes instead of legs, an innovation in motel management at the time.
I close the brochure and have a funny thought: does anyone care about history anymore?
Our room is small and dark and smells like chlorine, even though there is no swimming pool. I’m tired in a way that feels permanent. I take off my sneakers. My toes are swollen, the pads tender. On my soles I find blisters filled with white fluid and think about the barnacles hugging the bottom of my mother’s ship. If you open barnacles up, do you find something soft inside?
Our room has double beds with forest green comforters and headboards that are slabs of honey-colored wood. In the center of each headboard, there is a lattice cut of a bear walking through a forest. We sit on a bed, facing each other, and Marcus tells me about an exercise that can help you find a person you are looking for. It goes like this:
First, close your eyes and picture a movie screen. You are sitting in the audience, in the dark of the theater. Imagine this person appearing on the screen. See her face. Second, imagine a phone booth in the corner of the screen. See the doors to the booth open. Hear the phone ringing. Third, see yourself leaving the audience and entering the screen. See yourself answering the ringing phone. See yourself saying, Hello, where are you? Imagine you are hearing this person speaking back.
In this imaginary theater, I sink into the seat and wait for my mother to appear.
“How did it go?” Marcus asks when I open my eyes.
I don’t tell him that I couldn’t get past my mother’s face on the movie screen, couldn’t get to the booth and the ringing phone. My imagination is only feeling so cooperative.
“It went,” I say.
In the evening, Marcus wants to walk, to move: on the buses, we sat still for unnaturally long periods of time. We have energy stored inside us. We go out into the streets and watch clouds slip across a fat moon.
At this hour in Boston, on the brink of dusk, the windows in the buildings would start to shine bright as jewels. Here the skyline is low and the windows stay dark.