“We’re glad to have you back,” he said.
Don’s elderly father is among the new tenants, so not every new guest is a paying one, I guess. He totters around in faded plaid shirts, leaning on a cane, and smiles apologetically. When his arthritis is bad he lives here so Don can take care of him. There’s also a pair of mannish, gangly sisters from Vermont, whom I haven’t seen up close but who give an impression of short hair and protruding teeth.
The fourth new resident is a guy not too many years out of college who seems an unlikely person to land alone at an obscure motel on the coast of Maine in early December. He’s handsome, with a five o’clock shadow, and unlike Kay—not far from him in age—has an arrogant manner. Maybe he’s a drug dealer seeking shelter or a day laborer whose work has disappeared with the cold; maybe he has a trust fund but is aimless and deranged.
But I haven’t met the new guests yet, save for sightings of Don Sr., because as soon as we got back from Thanksgiving Lena came down with the flu. Since we went to see the doctor in town she’s been confined to her bed. She sleeps for most of the day; I stay with her, I read to her and I write this account. Occasionally, feeling stir-crazy, I emerge for a few minutes, locking the door behind me, and stroll to the lobby or amble to the edge of the bluffs and stare out over the ocean. I leave the picture-window drapes open so I can check on her.
WHEN WE FIRST got here, months ago now, I went over the clutch of notes I’d made during Lena’s first year—some from the time of belief in hallucination and some from afterward, the uncertain time.
After the fact it was easy to find a thread that ran throughout them, a thread that reinforced my idea that the voice had said “Phowa,” that it might have referred, on Lena’s first day, to the transmigration of souls. I patched together pieces of text and saw a story there, I thought—did I imagine it, or was it real? I read the pieces as a story of consciousness, believing the voice had always known it would fade when its host began to speak on her own.
I uncovered references to the human brain, to “Broca’s area” and “Wernicke’s area,” which at the time I’d assumed were geographic but which an online search told me had to do with the capacity for speech. There were terms like remote insult and neural plasticity. Yet there was also a lexicon of religious terms, of Hindu words like jiva, mentions of the Sikh brotherhood, the passing along of the soul from one body to another until its liberation.
There were allusions to Jainism and to African faiths—àtúnwá, I was even able to decipher: a Yoruba belief in the rebirth of the ancestors.
KAY OFFERED to babysit Lena tonight while I went to the café to grab some dinner, to give me time out of the room. Lena was already sleeping when I got back after the meal and Kay and I talked in hushed tones, standing near the doorway.
She told me she was a med student and volunteered in a neonatal intensive care unit. There, she said, one of her tasks was “cuddling”—their name for holding babies, just as Lena had said. These were sick babies, some born without a chance of lasting, and they liked the touch of skin. Incubators and other machines weren’t enough.
“My shift was late-night,” she said. “You know, when the mothers were sleeping. Or some of the NICU babies didn’t have mothers who could hold them, they’d be addicts or occasionally they’d have died in childbirth.”
She’d hold one of these fragile infants and her next shift, if the infant had gone, she never followed up—it was the policy and she tried to observe it. But this part of her work had proved too much for her. Eventually it had driven her to antidepressants that didn’t work and she’d spun out and taken a leave of absence.
She was unfit to be a doctor, she said, shaking her head, but she’d wanted to be a doctor all her life.
“I don’t have much longer to decide, the program will give my place to someone else,” she said, and looked down at the floor to hide the fact that her eyes were filling.
She’s just a girl, I thought with a pang, grown up thin and sad. I wondered where her parents were, if they knew how miserable she was. Since I had Lena I see my own child in any young woman; before that they were only adults, but now they’re former children.
How did a young girl come to be alone in a cold motel, I thought, a row of rooms, because she was deemed mature enough? Not long ago she’d lived safely, I imagined, in her parents’ home, and now here she was, wretched. Alone.
Not everyone, really hardly anyone, is suited to the job of constant dying babies, I said to her as gently as I could. Most doctors wouldn’t be equal to that particular task . . . she nodded but I could tell she’d heard this before and it was useless to her, though she was too polite to say so.
I felt low after she went away and curled up next to my daughter in her bed.