Shelly had been admitted to a place called Belliver House. Hector had driven her there that morning, while his father was napping. It wasn’t the Four Seasons, but she’d get her pills on time and wouldn’t be digging in a Dairy Queen dumpster for edibles. Hector said his father had been crying ever since. He told me this after Larry Beukes had shuffled back to bed, where he’d spent almost the entire day. By then Hector and I were sitting in front of The People’s Court with tea and warm date cookies, their insides sweet and gluey, bits of walnut in them to give a little crunch.
Hector leaned forward over his plate to speak to me in a confidential tone that was entirely unnecessary, since we were all alone. “I used to be kinda jealous of you, you know. The way my mom talked about you. The way you did everything right. Good grades. Never talking back. I’d call Ma from Tokyo to tell her I just ate sushi with a relative of the emperor, and she’d say, ‘Oh, great. By the way, bucko just invented a working nuclear reactor out of spare Legos and rubber bands.’” He shook his head, grinning beneath his Tom Selleck mustache. “She was right about you, though. You were every bit the stand-up kid she said you were. If not for you, I don’t know how my dad would’ve managed the last year and a half. And Ma . . . back before it all slipped away from her, you gave her a reason to get up every morning. You made her laugh. You made her a lot happier’n I ever did, I guess.”
I was mortified. I didn’t know what to say. I fixed my gaze on the TV, and with my mouth half full I said, “Great cookies. Just like your mom used to make ’em.”
He nodded wearily. “Yeah. I found the recipe in one of her notebooks. You know what she called ’em?”
“Date cookies?”
“Mike’s Favorite,” he said.
13
I WENT TO SEE HER now and then over the next couple years. Sometimes I went with Larry, sometimes with Hector, who’d moved to San Francisco to be closer to his parents. Later I drove myself.
The first year or so, she was always glad to see me, even if she thought I was the TV repairman. But by the time I was a senior in high school, she no longer acknowledged me when I visited—or anyone else. She sat in front of the TV in the overcrowded common room, a sunlit space that smelled of urine and old people and dust, a place with dirty tile floors and fraying secondhand furniture. Her head lolled forward on her neck, the folds of her chin sunk into her chest. Sometimes she would whisper to herself, “Next channel, next, next, next.” She got very excited whenever someone changed the channel, would bob up and down in her seat for a couple moments before settling back into her melted slouch.
Maybe a month before I left for MIT, I drove into San Francisco for a meeting with the home-brew computer hobbyists, and on the way back I got off the interstate two exits early and swung by Belliver to look in on Shelly. She wasn’t in her room, and the nurse at the desk couldn’t tell me where to find her if she wasn’t in front of the TV. I discovered her sitting in a wheelchair by some vending machines in a side hallway, down the corridor from her bedroom, unattended and forgotten.
It had been a while since Shelly even seemed to notice me, let alone recognize me. But when I knelt next to her, something, some dim awareness, brightened in those green eyes of hers that had gone as soft and faded as sea glass.
“Bucko,” she whispered. Her gaze shifted away and came back again. “Hate this. Wish. I could forget. How to breathe.” And then that faint, almost amused light flickered in her eyes. “Hey. What’d you do with that camera? Wouldn’t you like to take my picture? Something to remember your best girl by?”
My whole back went as goose-bumpy and cold as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on me. I leapt away from her, then went around behind her and grabbed the handles of her chair and rolled her out into the hall, rumbled her briskly on to the lobby. I didn’t want to know what she meant. I didn’t want to think about it.
I cornered the nurse behind the desk and made ugly noises at her. I said I wanted to know who had left my mother by a fucking vending machine and how long she’d been there and how much longer she would have been there if I hadn’t randomly stopped by. When I spoke of her as my mother, I had no sense that this was in any way a lie. And it felt good to be angry. It was a sorry second to being loved, but it was better than nothing.
I yelled until the nurse was flushed and looked stricken and shamed. It satisfied me to see her dab at her eyes with a tissue, to see the way her hands shook when she picked up the phone to call her supervisor. And while I vented, Shelly sat in her wheelchair, head lolling on her chest, as forgotten and invisible as she’d been by the vending machines.
How easily we forget.
14
THAT NIGHT A HOT WIND—it was like air blowing from an open furnace—tore through Cupertino, and thunder banged, but no rain fell. When I went out to my car in the morning, I found a dead bird on the hood. The gale had flung a sparrow into the windshield hard enough to snap its neck.
15
MY DAD ASKED IF I planned to visit Shelly before I left for Massachusetts.
I said I thought I would.
16
THE SOLARID WAS IN A box in my bedroom closet, along with the photo album of Shelly’s thoughts and a manila envelope containing the Phoenician’s memories. What—did you think I threw any of that away? That I could’ve thrown any of it away?
Once, a few weeks after I saw the last of the Phoenician, I got his not-a-camera down from the top shelf in my closet and brought it to the garage. Just touching it made me nervous. I remembered how when Frodo put on the Ring, he became visible to Sauron’s infected red eye, and I was afraid that merely by coming in contact with the Solarid I might somehow summon the Phoenician back. Hey, fatso. Remember me? Yeah? You do? Not for long.
But in the end, after turning it over and over in my hands, I put it back in the closet. I never did anything with it. I didn’t take it apart. I couldn’t see how to. There were no seams, no places where the plastic parts joined together. It was, impossibly, all of one piece. Perhaps if I took a picture, I might’ve learned something more, but I didn’t dare. No, I shoved it back in the closet and then hid it behind a box of wires and circuit boards. After a month or two, I was sometimes even able to go fifteen minutes without thinking about it.
The weekend before I was set to depart for Boston—my dad and I were flying there together—I opened the closet and went looking for it. A part of me didn’t expect it to be there, had almost come to believe that the Phoenician was someone I’d dreamed up in a day of fever and emotional distress, years earlier. But the Solarid was there, just as I re membered it. Its blank blind glass eye stared down at me from the top shelf, a mechanical cyclops.
I set it gently in the backseat of my Honda Civic, so I wouldn’t have to look at it while I drove to Belliver House. Just staring at it felt dangerous. Like it might suddenly, vengefully go off and wipe my mind, to punish me for letting it gather dust for four years.